Integrated Resource Management in Cognitive Radio

The today´s radio environment features a heterogeneous mix of radio access technologies. The technology that facilitates accessing different air interfaces at different times with the same radio equipment is known as software-defined radio (SDR). A cognitive radio system manages the operational modes of SDR equipment as a function of the radio environment. This paper introduces a novel approach to resource management in cognitive radio. We coin it integrated resource management (IRM) because it integrates the management of radio and computing resources. The corresponding system then features two cognitive cycles, the computing cycle and the radio cycle. We demonstrate the suitability of our proposal in a heterogeneous radio and computing scenario. In particular, simulation results show that two simple IRM algorithms can considerably reduce the number of lost user sessions due to inappropriate reconfiguration decisions. The paper concludes that such an integrated resource management, when embedded in a cognitive radio system, can intelligently distribute the radio and computing loads, while adapting to environmental changes.