Energy benefits of cooperative docitive over cognitive networks

Cognitive radios facilitate an autonomous and distributed deployment for a variety of applications. A truly cognitive device, however, needs to exhibit a certain degree of intelligence to draw optimum decisions based on prior observations and anticipated actions. Said intelligence comes along with a high complexity and poor convergence, which currently prevents any viable deployment of cognitive networks. However, the recently introduced and largely unexplored concept of docitive networks, where more expert nodes teach less expert nodes, allows both cognitive complexity as well as convergence to be significantly reduced. These achieved performance gains can be translated into energy gains, which will be focus of this paper. The baseline scenario is an ultra-high capacity network topology envisaged in beyond next-generation deployments offering capacity in the order of 1Gbps/km². We show that, in dependency of the required download volumes, a docitive deployment offers significant energy gains over a cognitive one. Typically, shorter download volumes yield larger gains.