A cognitive engine architecture for professional wireless microphone systems

In recent years, the increasing demand of spectral resources from wireless services had risen the need for a higher spectrum efficiency in general and for Programme Making and Special Events (PMSE) systems in particular. To overcome the limitations of previous static spectrum allocation, the Cognitive Radio paradigm with opportunistic spectrum sharing has been proposed. A dynamic resource assignment, however, is quite challenging especially for non-linear analog radio transmitters, like wireless microphones with their challenging requirements regarding data loss and delay. In this paper, we motivate the future need of a dynamic frequency allocation process for PMSE systems that recognizes internal and external constraints, such as intermodulation products or emerging interference from other systems in the radio spectrum. We present a Cognitive Engine architecture, that considers these constraints and evaluate its performance for a selected interference scenario. Furthermore, to enable a proactive behavior for future PMSE system operation, we introduce an efficient method to rate radio spectrum and evaluate its strength with real-world data collected from a spatially large spectrum scanning network.