An autonomic communication based conceptual and architecture model for cognitive radio nodes

Cognitive radio has been a research hotspot because of its promise to improve the utilization of the assigned but unused radio spectrum. To accomplish this task, cognitive radio network should configure itself to adapt to its communication context. Autonomic computing and communication have been proposed to enable the computing and communication network self-management. Based on the similarity between cognitive radio and autonomic communication, the cognitive cycle is modeled by autonomic computing principles. Then, cognitive radio conceptual and architecture model with autonomic property are proposed. Cognitive radio nodes realized by the proposed models are easy to form an autonomic cognitive radio network, which can be looked as an autonomic communication environment. The autonomic cognitive radio node is expressed by autonomic communication element (ACE) architecture and a realization method is given based on the open-source ACE toolkit, which establishes a simulation environment for cognitive radio research.