Opportunistic Spectrum Access: From Theory to Practice

In this article, an experimental study of the less studied topic of distributed OSA implementation have been presented. Hardware technologies do not provide the cognitive transceiver requirements needed to exploit OSA to its full potential, suboptimal OSA approaches developed to target that low-complexity transceivers can achieve significant performance gains compared to approaches theoretically optimized disregarding the practical system constraints, is demonstrated. Theoretical OSA approaches can exploit the gains available to the individual practical components. A radio transceiver with cognition capabilities and real-time reconfigurability can be used to realize cognitive radio networks.