Cognitive Radio

Cognitive radio was first proposed in a 1998 seminar by Joseph Mitola III at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. A year later, this new wireless communication approach was published in an article by Mitola and Gerald Maguire Jr. At first, it was foreseen as a software-defined radio extension - full cognitive radio - in which all observable wireless node parameters are considered. This was Mitola’s original idea, but most modern research of this technology focuses on spectrum-sensing cognitive radio, which is simpler. The main hindrance to cognitive radio, however, is actually designing a high-quality sensing device and accompanying algorithms for exchanging spectrum-sensing data between different nodes, as simple energy detectors cannot guarantee accurate signal detection.