A Framework of Access Network Architecture for 4G Systems Based on Cognitive Radio

Recently, cognitive radio is becoming a popular research field and is considered to be a revolutionary technology for the next generation wireless systems (4G). However, the introduction of cognitive radio has great influences on network architecture of 4G systems. Therefore, a framework of logical architecture for 4G composite radio environments is proposed on the basis of cognitive radio. The proposed logical entities can make the signaling interchange among different RANs more smoothly and provide common radio resource management to improve frequency efficiency. Meanwhile, the user terminal equipped with cognitive radio can detect multiple RANs and can reconfigure terminal parameters according to the software components downloaded from network side.