Cognitive radio equipments supporting spectrum agility

This paper describes the practical design issues and potential strategies for implementing cognitive radio (CR) equipments that support spectrum agility. We first discuss a simplified cognitive cycle that satisfies the requirements of a typical CR scenario. We give a brief overview of the various steps involved in the above cycle, namely, sensing, decision making and flexible signal processing. A management architecture called HDCRAM (Hierarchical and Distributed Cognitive Radio Architecture Management) is proposed as a solution for efficiently managing all the steps in the cognitive cycle. Finally we give an integrated proposal, which serves a starting point for designing future spectrum agile CR equipments.