Radio Engineering: From Software Radio to Cognitive Radio

Chapter 5Cognitive Cycle Management¹

 

 

 

5.1. Introduction

The design of cognitive radio (CR) equipment will not be possible by means of current design tools used for conventional radio devices. The reason being that conceiving the transmission/reception part of such equipment is no longer simply a question of signal processing (radio). In most industrial domains from now on, the system design evolves more and more toward the problem of software/hardware co-design with devices having a plurality of functionalities and operating modes. However, beyond these commonalities, CR equipment design specifically requires us to integrate an architecture to manage the various elements of simplified cognitive cycle (see Figure 1.2), namely:

– sensors;

– different means to decide reconfiguration;

– adaptation capacity of processing in real time.

Signal processing is not restricted here to the physical layer only. It includes signal processing of all the layers till the application layer (e.g. image processing as illustrated in section 3.3.3). This reflects the fact that we consider the CR in a broad sense, not restricting it to spectrum management only, as pointed out in Chapter 1. In the context of CR, we must also consider the signal processing of newly added elements, in addition to the radio transmission chain itself. The following is the processing related to:

– sensors for bringing additional information of the equipment’s environment;

– various decision-making modes that the equipment ...