Cognitive Radio Network Architecture: Part I - General Structure

Cognitive radio has been considered as a key technology for future wireless communications and mobile computing. The authors note the cognitive radios can form Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) by extending the radio link features to network layer functions and above. They categorize CRN architecture into several structures and classify the unidirectional links in such structures, to pave the way for future systematic CRN research. Among diverse wireless technology supporting Internet access and other stream traffic services, a different vision is to integrate different wireless systems/networks and to appropriately use one of them based on the communication environments and the application requirements, based on reconfigurable communication and networking.