A Common Application Requirement Interface for Cognitive Wireless Networks

We discuss the design of a common application requirement interface (CAPRI) for cognitive wireless networks. Applications can use CAPRI to express optimization goals and policies they expect the network to follow, which can subsequently be used by cognitive engines in their optimization processes. We believe that CAPRI design fills in an important gap in the current architectural understanding of CWNs, namely the lack of a common interface through which applications can express their requirements to the network. Existing work in this direction has been mainly focusing on hard QoS solutions, lacking the generality and expressiveness needed for CWN applications. We outline the architectural principles behind our design and give a detailed description of the basic functionalities supported by the interface. While the work has been carried out in the context of cognitive resource manager (CRM) development, the design is general and usable in other cognitive engines as well.