Distributed Resource Map: A database-driven network support architecture for Cognitive Radio ad hoc networks

Obtaining awareness of the operating environment is crucial to the successful operation of a Cognitive Radio (CR) network. In a multihop CR ad hoc network, aggregating knowledge about the external environment is a task which the CR nodes must perform based on their individual and collective capacity. In this paper, we introduce Distributed Resource Map (DRM), a framework for cooperation and knowledge aggregation in cognitive radio ad hoc networks. The DRM is a database-driven knowledge base aimed at exploiting distributed sensing performed by heterogeneous CR nodes and inter-nodes cooperation to maintain a network-wide support architecture. The awareness obtained through DRM architecture is used to drive the learning and decision making functions of a Cognitive Engine (CE). We present the core concepts, the architectural components, underlying knowledge aggregation functions, and a summary of the validation and realization effort. The paper concludes with a planned experimental work for DRM.