A comparative study of cognitive radio platforms

Abstract

Cognitive radio (CR) technology has become one of the buzzwords within the wireless communications community over the past 12 years. Its ability to learn, decide and adapt to the external environment made CR attractive to regulators, researchers, academia, politicians and the industry. CR promises to bring a paradigm shift in spectrum management policies from command-and-control regime to dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access. Despite more than a decade of research in the CR area, there are too little CR systems ready for the market. This lack of ready CR systems may reflect an overemphasis in the CR literature on theory and simulations with less work done in experimental-based-research and publications. In order to fast-track the real-life deployments of CR systems, the research community is now focusing on the development of CR platforms. With different software defined radio (SDR) packages and hardware available, it is confusing to decide which one to build or use. The objective of this paper is to study the design of CR platforms making use available SDR software packages and hardware. Our conclusion is that CR research should now focus on experimental-based results using real-life CR platforms in order to realize market-ready CR systems.