Cognitive Networks: Towards Self-Aware Networks

10.3. Community Architecture for Cognitive Radio

The existing world of spectrum-dependent devices and systems and the associated set of policies and regulations essentially create a community of spectrum users. Inherent with this community is an architecture which includes the conventions, such as protocols and operational procedures, and the spectrum policies and regulations that make it possible for such radio devices to operate and coexist with themselves and other devices. The baseline architecture uses static conventions and policies that are not typically presented in machine-readable formats, thus limiting applications for dynamic spectrum access envisioned by cognitive radios. Knowledge representation and semantics can provide such a cognitive radio community architecture with a shared base of constructs that can enable a more flexible and dynamic environment.

Declarative semantics deal with languages for making statements about what is or is not the case and typically provide a formal theory of what it means for statements to follow from or entail other statements. The standard semantics of FOL is a prime example of declarative semantics. OWL and DL are also in this category. All of these languages can be given what is called a model-theoretic semantics. The following subsections (Sections 10.3.1–10.3.4) show how such languages provide a mechanism for encoding knowledge of use in cognitive radio applications. To do that, the following focuses on a simple example taken ...