TABLE OF CONTENTS The preceding chapters covered many of the challenges that must be addressed to implement a cognitive radio, including how to build a cognitive radio on a software radio platform, how to achieve network and positional awareness, how a radio can be designed to learn, and how to incorporate internal representations of the world and the device into the radio. Even though realizing cognitive radio requires significant work to apply and refine these techniques, it seems reasonable to assume that cognitive radios are in our near future.
But what happens when we deploy cognitive radios? Will they perform as we expect when faced with a realistic environment? And exactly what is a realistic environment?
To answer these questions, we need to take a slightly different view of how cognitive radios will operate. The preceding chapters frequently made use of the cognition cycle to understand the operation of cognitive radios. However, the cognition cycle presents a limited view of the outside world (the environment in which the cognitive radios are observing, learning, and reacting). A more realistic view of the operation of cognitive radios would depict an outside world whose state is jointly determined by the adaptations of several cognitive radios. Thus, for the purposes of understanding how cognitive radios will behave, it is more accurate to envision cognitive radios operating as shown in Figure 15.1 where cognitive radios react to an outside world determined by both "dumb" and other...
