Cognitive Radio: why there is insufficient push from industry?

Despite of the recent strong interest in the cognitive radio standardization, industry investments and deployments in this field evolves very slowly due to many factors. On one hand, the 802.22 does not support any mobile and hand-over operations unlike the other telecommunications standards such as cellular networks. Further, using access technologies based on the opportunistic spectrum sharing raises some technical challenges like the sensing reliability and the hidden node problem.
The Cognitive Radio literature commonly ignores these concerns and assumes that all secondary users have perfect knowledge of their environment with no hidden nodes and when the primary user is off the air. They consider a perfect spectrum monitoring and ideal sensing operations. However, these are not realistic assumptions in a radio environment that may not be reciprocal and when the interferer cannot, always, hear the interfered.

Cognitive radio standards could have a great potential to be more attractive to most operators and telecommunication industry if the business use cases offered are reconsidered and enhanced. In fact, operators are interested in indoor scenarios and smaller cells like micro, pico and femto cells. Mobility is also a vital requirement that need to be seriously taken into consideration. Moreover, geographic coordination through a central database to identify the vacant sub-channels is a good substitute for the spectral sensing concept, a combination of both methods may be also envisaged. For instance, the FCC’s rulemaking has recently required geographic coordination through a central database rather than spectral sensing. Furthermore, providing broadband access in the remote areas where there is poor mobile coverage has always been a challenging issue for operators. The good propagation conditions, the excellent building penetration and the high spectrum efficiency which are the main characteristics of TV bands may help fulfilling these requirements. Actors in the field of mobile communications begun to discuss and explore the opportunities offered by the use of TV bands to deploy cellular technologies like LTE [1].

Are there any other reasons explaining why there is no encouraging push from industry towards open frequency assignment policies?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] Rahman, M. I., Behravant, A., Koorapaty, H., Sachs, J., & Balachandran, K. (2011). License-exempt LTE systems for secondary spectrum usage: Scenarios and first assessment. In Proceeding of the IEEE Symposium on New Frontiers in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks, (pp. 349-358). IEEE.