Guest Editorial - Advances in cognitive radio networking and communications (I)

The objective of this special issue is to bring together the state-of-art research results, designs, and industrial applications of cognitive radio (CR) networks and communications. We received 110 paper submissions and, after a careful review process to assess the quality of the papers, we accepted 37 papers, which will be published in this and the next IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC) issue. In this issue, there are 18 papers, which cover spectrum sensing techniques, physical layer spectrum sharing optimization, cognitive radio design, and interference modeling. The first set of seven papers in this issue is related to spectrum sensing techniques. The second set of six papers is related to the design and optimization of spectrum sharing from a physical layer perspective. The third set of papers is related to CR design and interference modeling. In the next issue of 19 papers, the topics include medium access control, routing and Quality-of-Service (QoS) support in cognitive radio networks, spectrum auction and trading, and security issues in cognitive radio.