Introducing cognitive systems in the wireless B3G world: Motivations and basic engineering challenges

The wireless world migrates towards the “Beyond the 3rd Generation” (B3G) era. It is envisaged that the B3G era will be characterised by advances in the infrastructure, the applications/services supported, and the business model. These characteristics also mean that the management of the wireless B3G world will be more complex, compared to previous generations. It is believed that an efficient response to complexity is the introduction of cognitive systems. In this respect, the first objective of this paper is to discuss on the infrastructure-, application-, and business-driven motivation for the introduction of cognitive systems. A second objective is to introduce the basic engineering challenges for the successful introduction. The approach for presenting the motivations includes: (i) the basic features, and the consequent requirements for the management functionality, associated with the network infrastructure, application areas and business model envisaged for the wireless B3G world; (ii) argumentation that cognitive systems are efficient means for satisfying these requirements. The approach for presenting the basic engineering challenges includes: (i) the envisaged structure of a cognitive system; (ii) issues related to the deployment of the cognitive systems in a B3G infrastructure.