Cognitive Radio Architecture: The Engineering Foundations of Radio XML

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION

This book is about making radios so smart that they can autonomously discover how, when, and where to use radio spectrum to obtain information services without having previously been programmed to do so. Cognitive radio integrates machine perception software into wireless systems—radio nodes and networks. Radios today are evolving from awareness (e.g., of location) toward cognition: the self-aware radio autonomously learns helpful new wireless information access and use behaviors, not just sensing the radio frequency (RF) spectrum but also perceiving and interpreting the user in the user's environment via computer vision, speech recognition (speech-to-text), and language understanding (Figure 1-1).

This progression of awareness and adaptation toward cognitive radio (AACR) leverages traditionally nonradio technologies: computer vision, navigation, speech recognition and synthesis, and the semantic web [1]. Machine perception grounds the ideal cognitive radio's "self" and its perception of its user's communications needs, priorities, and intent in the world of space, time, and situation so that the ideal cognitive radio (iCR) more transparently and efficiently accesses useful information via whatever wireless means might be made available. The wireless mantra "always best connected" (ABC) is transformed by the iCR focus on quality of information (QoI) to "always better informed" (ABI). This transformation is facilitated by semantic web technologies like the ...