Cognitive Networks: Towards Self-Aware Networks

10.5. An Architecture for Cognitive Radio Applications

As we have seen, cognitive radio, as an engineering endeavor, bridges community and device architectures. In doing so, it must bridge linguistic styles of both declarative and imperative semantics. The state of the art in radio device technology, software defined radio (SDR), is built upon object-oriented programming, the semantics of which is essentially imperative in nature. However, the semantics of imperative programming languages are not easily represented by the methods we have discussed. Moreover, from a practical point of view, one should not expect radio software engineers – who would probably be best qualified to do the job – to engage in the arduous task of formalizing the semantics of their code using languages that are foreign to their expertise and are not currently part of the tools of their trade, nor likely to be so in the near future. The implication is that from an architectural and software engineering point of view a successful cognitive radio application must somehow integrate two distinct styles of development that have arisen independently, each style having its own history and associated typical platforms or infrastructure.

The situation is shown in Figure 10.4, which also shows components that relate the two platforms and help to unify them into an integrated application. On the one hand, shown on the left side of the figure, there is the SDR platform. On the other hand, shown on the right side, we ...