New vision for the world of wireless communications enabled with cognition

Much has been written on cognitive radio as a novel idea for improved utilization of the radio spectrum. Specifically, cognitive radio provides the means for this improved utilization by making it possible for secondary (cognitive radio) users to access subbands of the radio spectrum whenever and wherever the primary (legacy) users are not utilizing their subbands. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that papers written on cognitive radio have been growing exponentially in number over the past ten years. For a radio system to be cognitive in the full sense of the word, the five principles of cognition should feature in the design of the system. The five principles of cognition are as follows (Haykin, 2011): perception-action cycle; memory; attention; intelligence; and language.