Evolution of Wireless Communication Systems Towards Autonomously Managed, Cognitive Radio Functionalities

This contribution presents key functionalities and design approaches of a distributed system architecture as it is studied in the framework of the European E²R II project. An emphasis is laid on policy based self-governance, distributed reconfiguration concepts and corresponding cognitive support functionalities; this support is necessary to assure context awareness in the equipment in order to facilitate (enable) distributed decision making. The idea is to distribute decision making functionalities among network and user equipment elements in order to (i) limit the required calculation complexity on the network and user side for the determination of the optimum resource selection strategy, (ii) increase the reactivity of the equipment to any context change minimizing the required amount of human interaction and (iii) minimize the signaling overhead by broadcasting generic policy rules applicable to all users instead of targeting a user-by-user based reconfiguration approach. A simple use case illustrates how Game Theoretic tools can be used in order to derive suitable policies and how to perform decisions.