Tactical Wireless Communications and Networks: Design Concepts and Challenges

7.7 Concluding Remarks

7.7.1 Development of Cognitive Radios

The field of producing hardware for CRs is still evolving. There are some available hardware and software platforms as mentioned below.

GNU¹³ radio is a free software signal processing toolkit that helps engineers and scientists experiment with building and deploying SPR systems. GNU is rich with capabilities that allow its users to experiment with manipulating and using the electromagnetic spectrum. One of the basic design concepts of GNU radio is to allow its users to use single generic radio hardware. This hardware can be used to feed complex CR formations into the powerful GNU signal processing software.

The GNU radio toolkit also utilizes the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) which is a computer based transceiver with powerful ADC and DAC converters with circuitry to interface with a host computer. USRP interfaces with several transmitters and receivers covering frequency bands from 0 to 5.9 GHz.

Based on the DARPA XG project, an XG experimental radio was shown to reuse the 802.16 spectrum.

One can anticipate that CR hardware and software platforms will become more sophisticated and that tactical use of CRs will have more security focus and restrict rules for the radio evolution.

7.7.2 Modeling and Simulation of Cognitive Radios

Modeling and simulation of communications systems has undergone major overhauling as technology has advanced over the past few decades. Until the early 1980s, protocols were simple ...