Wireless Innovation Forum approves report on quantifying benefits of cognitive radio technologies

WASHINGTON, USA: The Wireless Innovation Forum (SDR Forum version 2.0), a non-profit organization dedicated to driving the future of radio communications and systems worldwide, announced the approval of the report, “Quantifying the Benefits of Cognitive Radio.”

The report presents the results of an extensive survey performed by the Wireless Innovation Forum (WInnF) Cognitive Radio Work Group (CRWG) on open and public Cognitive Radio (CR) literature. The intent of the report is to summarize the “hard numbers” required to assess the value proposition of CR technologies in future radio systems.

James Neel, of Cognitive Radio Technologies and Chair of the CRWG, said: “Cognitive radio is an exciting technology that is pushing wireless innovation forward in areas such as dynamic spectrum access in the TV White Spaces, self-organizing networks (SON) with femtocells, self-healing wireless LANs, real-time spectrum markets, and context aware smart phones. Tremendous claims are being made about what these applications will achieve – improving spectrum availability by 10 times, decreasing deployment costs by a factor of 4 and so on – claims which in the popular press tend to be unsubstantiated and end up sounding like marketing spin.”

According to Neel, in an effort to separate the hype from reality, the CRWG went back to original sources – conference proceedings, journals publications and regulatory filings – to extract the quantifiable benefits claimed for various cognitive radio technologies, the assumptions required to achieve those benefits, and the intended applications.

The report presents this information in an easily digestible format with issues related to coexistence, security, implementation, test, and regulation, allowing developers, researchers, and regulators to analyze the cost vs. benefit associated with integrating cognitive radio techniques into their solutions.

The document identifies many CR technologies that would be beneficial to commercial, defense, and public safety applications, and includes a review of issues and risks posed by CR that developers, users, and regulators should be aware of.