Research towards a cognitive network eco-system

Increasing demand for wireless information services, fixed, and inflexible access to spectrum, and overtaxing of cellular and backhaul infrastructure have combined to create opportunities for radically different wireless communications architectures. These emphasize devolved network control, adaptive topologies, and dynamic interference avoidance and mitigation that are inherent in the devices and networks. One incentive towards such architectures is a necessary transition from design and architecture approaches that emphasize individual link performance to a focus on maximizing aggregate throughput of node collections, even if this optimization is less ideal for individual links. This is critical to transition from a link to network density perspective. It will be shown that the optimal design points for network density and aggregate throughput are quite distinct from those appropriate for link optimization, and that some degree of interference may be necessary in order to maximize the aggregate capacity of the spectrum. The Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) community has focused on interference-free secondary sharing. This paper examines an alternative objective; “Interference Tolerant” operation, in which DSA is used to enable spectrum relocation in the event of unacceptable interference. It will be shown that there are significant increases in node density that are possible in these regimes.