Cognitive Radio In Wireless Communication:An Overview

Prashasti Agnihotri 15MECC19

Dept. of Electronics and Telecommunication
Institute of Technology
NIRMA UNIVERSITY
Email: 15mecc19@nirmauni.ac.in

The enabling technology,

COGNITIVE RADIO (CR) supports the
dynamic spectrum access; the policy that
addresses the spectrum scarcity problem
encountered by many countries. Thus, for
future
technologies
for
wireless
communications, CR is widely regarded
as most promising technology. To make
radios and wireless networks truly
cognitive, however, is by no means a
simple task, and it requires collaborative
effort
from
various
research
communities- including communications
theory, networking engineering, signal
processing, game theory, software
hardware
joint
design,
and
reconfigurable
antenna
and
radiofrequency design. In this paper, a
systematic overview on CR, networking
and communications by looking at the
key functions, network layers, CR
mechanisms. Finally, several questions
and challenges related to the CR network
design are also reviewed.
ABSTRACT: -

Keywords:- Wireless networks,CR, DSA, PHY,MAC

INTRODUCTION
The radio spectrum, which is needed for
Wireless Communication is a naturally
limited resource & day by day is crowded
due to increase in wireless devices and
applications. Cognitive Networks are
motivated by the apparent lack of spectrum
under the current Spectrum Management
policies. The right to use the wireless
spectrum in US controlled by Federal
Communication Commission (FCC). Some
wireless devices use the licensed band while
the others use the unlicensed band. These
unlicensed bands are used by Bluetooth, 3G,

digital cordless phones, WiFi, Zig Bee, and

NFS etc. Earlier to support the various
wireless applications, the fixed spectrum
access (FSA) policy has been has been
adopted by FCC. The FCC ruled in
November 2008 that unused portions of the
RF spectrum (known as white spaces) to be
made available for public use. White space
devices must include technologies to prevent
interference, such as spectrum sensing and
geolocation capabilities. Thus, only assigned
(licensed) users have the right to use the
allocated spectrum while the other users are
banned from using this bandwidth.
According to a study, it is revealed that a
large portion of the licensed spectrum
experiences low utilization approximately
15-85%.This FSA policy, faces the spectrum
scarcity and to overcome this spectrum
inefficiency problem, Dynamic Spectrum
Access techniques (DSA), has been
proposed as an alternative policy.
In DSA, a piece of spectrum is allocated to
one or more users called as the Primary
Users and others as the Secondary Users.
The key enabling the technology of DSA is
Cognitive Radio (CR), thus allowing the
unlicensed users to use the licensed band
when not used by the primary users. In this
way, Radio spectrum can be reused and
spectrum utilization efficiency can be
improved.

COGNITIVE RADIO
Joseph Mitola at the Defense Advanced
Research Project Agency (DARPA)
developed the idea for CR. Cognitive Radio
is a form of wireless communication in
which a transceiver intelligently detect the
communication channels that are in use and
which are not, and instantly move into
vacant channels while avoiding occupied
ones. This in return optimizes the use of
available radio frequency (RF) spectrum
while minimizing the interference to the
other users.
In its most basic form, CR is a hybrid
technology involving Software Defined
radio (SDR) as applied to spread spectrum
communications. The functions of cognitive
radio include the ability of transceiver to
determine its geographic location, identify
and authorize its user, sense neighboring
wireless devices in operation and adjust the
output
power
and
modulation
characteristics. There are two main types of
cognitive radio, full cognitive radio that
takes into account all parameters that a
wireless network can be aware of and the
other spectrum- sensing cognitive radio to
detect channels in the radio frequency
spectrum.

CR systems do allow coexistence between

primary users and secondary users, but still

primary users will always have priority in

using the spectrum. Two main objective of
the CR:
1. To improve the utilization of the
frequency spectrum.
2. To achieve the highly reliable and
efficient wireless communication.
CR NETWORK MECHANISM
CR uses Intelligent Signal Processing (ISP)
at a physical layer of a wireless system and
achieved by combining ISP with Software
Defined Radio (SDR). SDR is a single radio
which might be configured to work on
different bands, frequency in different
technologies and this configuration can be
changed as per our need.

Fig: - Block diagram contrasting the SDR & CR

COGNITIVE RADIO TECHNOLOGY

Cognitive radio was initially thought of as a
sofware- defined radio extension (full cognitive
radio), most of the work focuses on spectrumsensing cognitive radio. The main problem in
spectrum-sensing coognitive radio is designing
high-quality spectrum-sensing devices and
algorithms for exchanging spectrum-sensing
data between nodes.For example, in a simple
energy detector, accurate detection of signals is
not guranteed and thus increasing the number of
sensing nodes decreases the probability of false

detection. To fill free RF bands adaptively,

OFDMA is the possible approach.Timo A.
Weiss and Friedrich K. Jondral of the
University of Karlsruhe proposed a spectrum
pooling system, in which free bands (sensed by
nodes) were immediately filled by OFDMA sub
bands.

CR has following characteristics:

a. cognitive capability- identify unused
spectrum at a specific time or
location(spectrum holes/white
spaces)

b) reconfigurability- CR is programmed to
transmit and receive on a variety of
frequencies and use different access
technologies supported by its hardware
design.

CR consists of four main blocks:

1. Spectrum Sensing a cognitive
radio monitors the available
spectrum bands, and captures their
information and then detects

spectrum holes. The various

spectrum-sensing techniques include
primary transmitter detection,
cooperative detection, and
interference detection.
2. Spectrum Management the
characteristics of spectrum holes that
are detected through spectrum
sensing are estimated i.e. select the
best band of spectrum in order to
meet the Quality of Service (QOS).
3. Spectrum mobility a cognitive
radio determines data rate, the
transmission mode, and the
bandwidth of the transmission
4. Spectrum sharing- where in
spectrum holes can be used by a
number of secondary users.

CR design involves the PHYsical (PHY),

Medium Access Control (MAC) and
network layers. Main functions of these
layers:
1. Physical layer- Spectrum sensing
identifies spectrum holes.
2. Mac layer- functions include
spectrum scheduling which controls
sensing operations and secondly
spectrum aware access control
governs the spectrum access to
identify spectrum holes.
3. Network layer- performs following
function-

1) Quality of Service (QOS)

2) Error control
3) Network tomography

ADVANTAGES & APPLICATIONS

CR ADAVANTAGES:
1. Improving spectrum utilization &
efficiency
2. Improving link reliability
3. Less expensive radios
4. Advanced network topologies
5. Enhancing SDR technologies
6. Automated
Radio
Resource
Management
7. Advanced interoperability
CR APPLICATIONS:-

Overall, we found that effective CR

communications should use the available
degrees of freedom in frequency, time, and
space as much as possible and react to
changes in these dimensions as quickly as
possible. The incorporation of advanced
PHY layer transmission techniques,
including multiple antennas and cooperative
communication, spectrum efficiency can be
greatly improved with enhanced system
capacity.
For realizing effective and efficient
spectrum sharing for CR communications
there are still some challenges to face:
Common control channel: For CR
operations, a common control
channel will pave the path to an
easier way of enabling information
exchange during spectrum sensing
and access in CR networks.
True opportunities & economy
models: We need to overcome the
traditional wireless communication
systems with respect to the economic
and engineering benefits using CRNbased systems. To understand that
how many spectrum holes are
commercially viable, more spectrum
measurements are required.

1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)

Extending mobile network

Open air network
Mobile video services
Military applications
Multi-technology phone
Emergency radio system
CONCLUSION

This paper provided an overview on CR in

wireless communications. Since there are
several things related to CR and its
applications undergoing research, this paper
tried setting up the basic overview about CR
and related elements.

REFERENCES
1. J. Mitola, Cognitive radioAn
integrated agent architecture for
software-defined radio, Ph.D.
dissertation, Roy. Inst. Technol.,
Stockholm,Sweden, May, 2000.
2. R. Tandra, M. Mishra, and A. Sahai,
What is a spectrum hole and what
does it take to recognize one? Proc.

IEEE,vol. 97, no. 5, pp. 824

848,May 2009.
3. G. Bansal, M. J. Hossain, and V. K.
Bhargava, Optimal and suboptimal
power allocation schemes for
OFDM-based
cognitive
radio
systems, IEEE Trans. Wireless
Commun., vol. 7, no. 11, pp. 4710
4718, Nov. 2008.
4. A. T. Hoang, T. C. Wong, and Y.-C.
Liang, Design and analysis for an
802.11-based
cognitive
radio
network, in Proc. IEEE WCNC,
Budapest, Hungary, 2009, pp. 16.
5. https://www.wikipedia.org/