Design issues in wide scanning range cognitive radios

Cognitive radios are being looked upon as the solution for the spectrum scarcity problem. Mitigating spectrum scarcity requires robust spectrum sensing receivers and frequency adaptive transmitters. Wideband cognitive radios are more attractive as they provide a wider range of secondary communication opportunities. They are accompanied by issues at the frontend architecture level, baseband distribution and spectrum sensing in the receivers. At a network level, the success of wideband cognitive radios are dependent on the network topology. This paper discusses these problems and provides guidelines for solving them.