Cognitive management strategies for dynamic spectrum access

The Cognitive Radio (CR) paradigm represents an innovative solution to mitigate the spectrum scarcity problem. Enabling a Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA), it conciliates the existing conflict between the ever-increasing spectrum demand and the currently inefficient spectrum utilization. The basic idea of DSA is to provide proper solutions that allow sharing radio spectrum among several radio communication systems and optimize the overall spectrum utilization. The first part of this chapter gives a general overview of the CR concept to enable DSA, whereas the second part of the chapter addresses the problem of modeling a cognitive management framework with innovative strategies for spectrum management in different scenarios. The presented framework is able to characterize the environment dynamicity through long-term predictions based on the so-called belief vector. This demonstrates that a reliable characterization of the radio environment that combines awareness of its surrounding with a statistical evaluation of the system dynamics in terms of traffic generation patterns is able to guarantee an efficient utilization of the available spectrum resources. From a methodological point of view, the development and assessment of the proposed cognitive management framework involves an analytical study and a real-time platform implementation.