Overview of cognitive radio and cognitive networks research at the University of York

Cognitive radio and cognitive networking will provide the next big innovations in wireless communications, they will: drastically improve the utilisation of the radio spectrum; increase the freedom for operators and users, boosting revenues. Heterogeneous systems should be allowed to freely use pooled spectrum: research should focus on techniques that maintain QoS; power efficient modulation techniques can be exploited. Incorporating intelligence is crucial to success: emphasis should be placed on distributed techniques; reinforcement learning looks very promising. Cognitive radio does not necessarily require significant complexity: a fully reconfigurable software radio is not required; applying intelligence can reduce complexity.