Master Program in Communications Engineering Institute for Networked Systems

Principles and Architectures of Cognitive Radios

By: Irving Antonio Barra Castillo HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT 1.

Matriculation number: 328023

Student Review of J. Mitola and G. Maguire paper on Cognitive Radios. In the present document, an important scientific paper written by Joseph Mitola III and Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. is summarized and reviewed. In general, the topic is cognitive radio technology and also the data representation of important parameters for the radio. The paper was first published in 1999, as part of the IEEE journal on personal communications. The paper of Mitola and Maguire introduces a descriptive language for cognitive radios, which is meant to enable the exchange of relevant communication parameters between radios in order to operate according to the well-established etiquette, i.e., conventions of proper usage of spectrum, power, etc. The writing starts with an interesting case of a GSM radio not having even the possibility to determine its internal structure, for example, for the electronics in charge of channel equalization. Even though the components and algorithms are there, the radio lacks of a method to analytically represent what is happening in its insides. It is here where the authors introduce the Radio Knowledge Representation Language or RKRL for short, which they claim will make such description possible. The problem of modeling the internals of the radio has not a strong focus in the paper; however from the semantics of the language one can very well derive a suitable modeling strategy. An interesting functionality mentioned in the paper is that cognitive radios could even track the users mobility in order to make adjustments accordingly, not only in the large scale, like when moving to another continent, but also in the medium to small scale, for example when the user is traveling in a taxi cab around the city. Of course, the authors admit that this level of complexity would also imply a requirement for high computing power. In order to properly make the point for the need of RKRL, the authors compare several existing languages that could help in describing radio related parameters. The analysis then shows that many of them do not completely fulfill the specific requirements of cognitive radios, thus a new language is definitely required. Using RKRL, radios would have the possibility to describe, interact and even anticipate or plan their future behavior, all while respecting the rules of usage or radio etiquette (limitations due to the laws of physics need to be considered as well). The authors use an interesting analogy with a chess game, in which the radio becomes the player who has a view of the board and can therefore plan ahead what movements could be done next according to the rules of the game. This general view is one of the key aspects RKRL is meant to enable. The descriptions follow a hierarchical structure which, more or less like the hierarchy of directories in a file system, but including also keywords to describe the relation between the components of the hierarchy. Cognitive radios could use RKRL as part of what the authors call cognitive cycle. During this cycle, radios analyze the stimuli in their surroundings to determine their location and environmental conditions of operation (temperature, height, etc), so that they can make the necessary adjustments in order to perform their intended task.
Principles and Architectures of Cognitive Radios

Homework #1

iNETS RWTH Aachen

Irving A. Barra C.

Students comments on the paper: During the first section of the paper, my personal impression is that the authors point is very strong, especially because of the detailed example of the receivers equalizer where it really shows that theres a need for something which allows the devices to indicate more detailed information, not only regarding to measurements only but also the actual parameters used in their operation. However, I think the approach they propose tends to be too ambitious and tries to cover so many aspects of this task that I can imagine that a real-world implementation of RKRL would only use a subset of the functionalities described in the paper. The language and the possibilities are described to some extent; however as a formal description of a new language, I would also expect to see in the paper some usage rules. Also, the comparison with other languages or description mechanisms, thought useful, could have been better by showing specific examples of how each one of them do the task, rather than the descriptive approach taken by the authors, in which a reader not familiar with the other languages being compared can only believe the arguments without a more tangible proof. Regarding the specifics of the RKRL, some examples are given thorough the paper, however the very description of the concept and the semantics is, at least for me, not so clear. The general idea is really interesting in the context of cognitive radios because it seems that a standardized language for the exchange of information related to communication parameters is necessary and will definitely help to improve the performance and speed of adaptation. Had the description of the RKRL been a bit clearer, I would say this paper was really good. However, since some technical aspects were not too deeply explained and what they did explain were ideas rather too futuristic, I think I would not put this paper in my top list.

Principles and Architectures of Cognitive Radios

Homework #1