Cognitive Radio Applications to Dynamic Spectrum Allocation

A Discussion and an Illustrative Example

David Maldonado, Bin Le, Akilah Hugine, Thomas W. Rondeau, Charles W. Bostian
Center for Wireless Telecommunications, Virginia Tech, Mail Code 0111, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0111
Abstract In an effort to improve radio spectrum management and promote a more efficient use of it, regulatory bodies are currently trying to adopt a new spectrum access model. At the same time, cognitive radio technology has received a lot of interest as a possible enabling technology. In this paper, we provide a brief description of the broad impact of cognitive radios in different markets. At Virginia Techs Center for Wireless Telecommunications (CWT), we have designed a biologically inspired cognitive engine with dynamic spectrum access (DSA) as one of its intended applications. An experimental software simulation shows a 20 dB SINR improvement using cognitive techniques in an interference environment over that provided by current IEEE 802.11a service PHY standard. Keywords- cognitive radio; DSA; cognitive engine; spectrum allocation

defined radio (SDR) technology), they are becoming capable of awareness and more intelligent operation. The evolution has already taken communication devices from fixed radios to adaptive-aware ones, and we enjoy the benefits when we use a modern cellular telephone. Cognitive radios (CR) are the next evolution of such devices through the addition of a layer of intelligence that provides the ability to better satisfy user and network needs. The cognitive radio initiatives have gained a lot of momentum with Joseph Mitolas concept of an intelligent communication device and a vision of what such a device could deliver [1]. Cognitive radio technology uses real-time knowledge of its environment to adapt its behavior dynamically with the intent to enhance its operation. The knowledge of the operational environment is referred to as situation awareness and will include, but is not limited to, information about the physical environment, RF channel, radio resources, and user/application requirements. Although neither a formal universal definition of CR nor a clear understanding about what level of sophisticated intelligence is needed to categorize a radio as cognitive exist, there is a consensus that a cognitive radio will include an informed decision making process that functions without any human intervention. III. COGNITIVE RADIO APPLICATION AREAS

I. INTRODUCTION The vision of cognitive radio has generated a lot of discussion and increasing attention from the wireless communications community in recent years. With the ability to learn from and adapt to both their surrounding environment and user needs, cognitive radios offer a great number of benefits in almost all markets of interest: military, government, public safety, and commercial. As a result of our work at Virginia Techs Center for Wireless Telecommunications (CWT), we have designed and are in the process of implementing a generalized cognitive engine/radio applicable to all these areas. In this paper, we will provide an overview of cognitive radio technology and describe the application areas where we see immediate benefit as well as our cognitive engine approach. We will then provide simulation results illustrating one of the most obvious and immediately beneficial cognitive radio applications: dynamic spectrum sharing. Although there are many techniques used to share spectrum and improve capacity in wireless channels, we will experimentally demonstrate that by sensing the environment and making real-time decisions on frequency, bandwidth, and waveform, we can achieve an increase of 20 dB signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) in wireless LANs over the standard techniques. This improvement is achieved using a very early-stage cognitive radio engine and indicates how much better performance a fully-developed solution can obtain. II. COGNITIVE RADIOS: MOVING TOWARDS A DEFINITION

As wireless communication devices move towards a more software-based and flexible hardware architecture (software

A. Government and Regulatory Interest With the promises of an intelligent and aware device, a wide range of applications have emerged, from Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) to interoperability solutions to the idea of a universal portable communicator; all of these target markets that range from military to commercial. DSA is currently being considered as the prime candidate for the first practical application of cognitive radio technology. The impact and possible importance of this application is felt throughout the United States agencies responsible for spectrum management. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Department of State have expressed interest in what CR technology has to offer and how it would affect their current regulatory scheme. In particular, the FCC has launched a set of initiatives to facilitate the development and deployment of this technology. One of their most recent actions will allow the use of cognitive radios/cognitive applications to be incorporated into certain TV bands [2]. The CR impact also extends beyond our geographical border as other countries and international

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agencies such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are looking to adopt a similar cognitive radio approach to increase spectrum utilization. We acknowledge that although dynamic spectrum access looks to be very promising, the complexity required to achieve it could be overwhelmingly difficult. B. Military The military community has recognized the benefits that this new radio technology offers. With frequency agility and/or flexibility, the ability to enhance interoperability between different radio standards, and the capability to sense the presence of interferers, CR has become a must-have technology. This technology offers advantages in the protection of communication transmissions, recognition of enemy communications, and the discovery of paths of opportunity. By recognizing other communication devices, the cognitive radio can address interoperability issues by adjusting itself to communicate with legacy systems. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has devoted a great amount of effort to advanced wireless topics in recent years and has established programs such as SPEAKeasy radio system, Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), and neXt Generation (XG) to further explore the possibilities of the creation of an intelligent communication agent. C. Public Safety Public safety and emergency response is another area in which cognitive radio has gained a lot of attention. For years public safety agencies have desperately needed additional spectrum allocation to ease frequency congestion and enhance interoperability. With spectrum sharing capabilities, cognitive radios can prove their effectiveness by utilizing some of the existing spectrum that is not widely used while help in maintaining call priority and response time. In addition, CRs can play an important part in improving interoperability by enabling devices to bridge communications between jurisdictions using different frequencies and modulation formats. The National Institute of Justice issued a call for proposals in which they seek to find a technology that can not only provide them with a solution to the interoperability issue they currently face but with an ubiquitous system able to handle communication needs yet to come [3]. D. Broader Impacts and Commercial Use With the proliferation of wireless technologies in the ISM band, especially after the success of wireless local area networks (WLAN) like 802.11, interference is becoming increasingly problematic. In urban environments, the ISM band is already showing the symptoms of spectrum scarcity as the demand for its use continues to increase and performance degradation becomes the norm. Although some technologies are currently using some adaptive techniques (802.11g uses channel identification, dynamic frequency selection, and adaptive modulation) to obtain higher data throughput, they are still governed by a standard that limits their full potential. By taking the CR approach into a challenging RF environment like the ISM band, where inherently the devices need to accept any interference while reducing the possibility of interfering with

others, it provides a framework for us to quantify current system performance and look at the improvements that the CRs can provide. It is within bands that are heavily utilized that we see the greater need for spectrum efficiency improvement and where the promises offered by CR technology could render its greater benefits. Leveraging on the success of wireless technologies such as 802.11 and new advances in emerging ones like 802.16 and .22 could help translate current CR research directly into commercial benefits. This could enhance the possibility of the provision for commercial off-the-shelf products for both military and public safety use. The realization of CR is still in the developmental stages although not far from reality because it leverages on the flexible SDR architecture, which is a heavily researched topic [4]. SDRs offer a flexible reconfigurable platform needed for CR implementation, but they currently face issues of flexibility, speed, power consumption, size, and price, just to mention a few, which limits their availability. Cognitive radio technology is an important innovation for the future of communications and likely to be a part of the new wireless standards, becoming almost a necessity for situations with large traffic and interoperability concerns. Dynamic channel allocation (DCA), also called dynamic spectrum allocation (DSA) [5], is one such technology-oriented sharing technique for hybrid networks. In [5], the results show that even a simplified algorithm can produce gains for the radio networks in the dynamic allocation scheme. Dynamic spectrum sharing between systems using different technologies is attracting increasing interest. Traditional static frequency planning is not spectrum efficient when the network becomes highly heterogeneous. AN INTELLIGENT INTERFACE CWT COGNITIVE ENGINE AND OUR GA APPROACH Cognitive radio technology provides radios with the ability to alter many of its parameters and make intelligent decisions regarding the adaptation to take. Instead of predefined channels and bandwidths, cognitive radios can choose their own center frequency and alter the bandwidth according to the available spectrum and network needs. Through this intelligent decision making process, a cognitive radio provides the solution to the market issues mentioned above: they will intelligently cooperate to make the best use of spectrum both in the presence of other cognitive radios and legacy, non-cognitive, radios. In order to communicate successfully, the radio must first be configured to fit the specific channel condition, such as a cellular fading channel or an interference-prone unlicensed channel; second, the radio must support user required service types, like voice or data; third, above everything else are the regulatory requirements the radio must obey to operate legally in any band and geographic location. To combine all these issues effectively and provide the best performance trade-off, the radio needs to be aware of its environment; in other words, the radio needs a Cognitive Engine (CE) to analyze the physical link, user demands, and regulatory regimes, and it must balance multiple objectives and constraints. Genetic algorithms (GA) are well suited to solving multi-objective optimization and decision problems, which is why we have IV.

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chosen to work with a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) in order to control the radios adaptive process. The wireless system genetic algorithm (WSGA) is a MOGA designed for the control of a radio by modeling the physical radio system as a biological organism and optimizing its performance through genetic and evolutionary processes. In the WSGA, radio behavior is interpreted as a set of PHY and MAC layer operation parameters defined by traits encapsulated in the genes of a chromosome. Other general radio functional parameters (such as payload size, antenna configuration, voice coding, encryption, equalization, retransmission requests, and spreading technique/code) are also identified as possible genes in the chromosome definition to allow for future growth through each layer of the radio communications stack. The chromosome shown in Figure 1 represents the PHY-layer traits currently of consequence to the WSGA due to current hardware limitations and the current state of the simulation. Refer to [6] and [7] for more information on this approach.
Power Frequency Pulse Shape Symbol Rate Modulation

assignment policy and with dynamic spectrum allocation using cognitive algorithms. A. Simulation Design An 802.11a/g OFDM WLAN PHY-layer communications system is established to simulate the performance improvement in terms of link QoS and efficiency of spectrum resource management when a layer of spectrum cognition is applied over current static (non-cognitive) PHY-layer standard. 1) System infrastructure The designed 802.11a/g WLAN system has an ad-hoc network topology as illustrated in Figure 2. Since only spectrum efficiency is investigated to show the benefits of cognitive implementation, only PHY-layer (spectrum behavior) is simulated. Therefore, the access-point-to-client link quality of service (QoS) is the primary parameter to evaluate the system capacity of the occupied channel (or the sub-network in terms of the point-to-multi-point scheme). For an OFDM PHY layer, the true network capacity is largely dependent on 802.11-type MAC-layer with CSMA/CA link control [10] [11] with a certain wireless channel model. The channel capacity is dependent on the SINR, and so we focus on the link SINR simulation on the spectrum behavior by adding cognitive spectrum management to the current WLAN standard. From the simulation it is clear that current 802.11a/g standards have very limited spectrum efficiency due to static OFDM channel assignment. By adding a layer of cognition to observe the spectrum condition and adaptively allocating the needed spectrum, two key performances are greatly improved. First, the link QoS is improved due to optimized channel selection; second, the utilization of the spectrum, as a global resource, is balanced throughout the network due to interference avoidance at each cognitive network node. The simulation system is developed using Matlab. The OFDM radio link is simplified by assuming an AWGN wireless channel. The established ad-hoc network consists of multiple access points (APs) with point-to-multipoint link configuration. In the static channel assignment simulation, the channels of APs and users are fixed regardless of the current channel condition. To illustrate the advantage of cognitive spectrum allocation, both the AP and user need only to have the capability to sense the signal in the operational band, and a simple optimization algorithm is applied to pick the static channel defined by the 802.11a standard. Even with such limited cognition for the spectrum, the performance is greatly improved both in link quality and overall spectrum efficiency. Figure 3 shows a sample of the simulation environment. First, it shows the placement of the WLAN systems where the circle represents the user and the asterisk the access point desired for communications. All other access points and spectrum users are interferers represented by triangles. The figure also shows the spectrum use for the available channels. It is immediately obvious from this figure that channel 4 will provide the highest SINR.

Figure 1. Representation of a chromosome for GA manipulation.

The WSGA analyzes the chromosomes fitness through a set of fitness functions defined by performance evaluations of the current radio channel. Each fitness function is weighted to represent the relative importance the user has associated with each objective. The fitness evaluation functions are designed to reflect the current link quality of both PHY and MAC layer, which currently include the mean transmitting power, data rate, BER, packet error rate (PER), spectral efficiency, bandwidth, interference avoidance, packet latency and packet jitter.

Figure 2. Conceptual diagram of experiment.

Another powerful feature of GAs is their incorporation of constraint modeling to the optimization problem, which gives us the opportunity to incorporate regulatory and physical restrictions during chromosome evolution. V. COGNITIVE RADIO EXAMPLE IMPROVEMENTS IN SPECTRUM UTILIZATION

The experiment sets a narrow focus to the unlicensed 5.8 GHz ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) band to compare the system performance in terms of spectrum utilization of IEEE 802.11a/g physical layers [8] [9] to a cognitive radio version of such a WLAN radio. In this experiment, we created a standard OFDM PHY layer of 802.11a/g WLAN and then simulated the spectrum utilization with both a static channel

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cognitive engine software core serves as one of the promising solutions.

35 30 Cognitive Radio Standard

Number of Access Points

25 20 15 10 5 0 -5 -10 -15 0 5 10 15 20 25 30

Average SINR
Figure 4. Improvement in SINR between CR and standard technique.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 9983463, DGE-9987586, and CNS0519959.
Figure 3. Sample experiment of the geography of user and interferers and the observed spectrum of SINR.

REFERENCES
J. Mitola, Cognitive Radio: An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Defined Radio, Ph.D. dissertation, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), 2000. [2] FCC, Facilitating Opportunities for Flexible, Efficient, and Reliable spectrum Use Employing Cognitive Radio Technologies, FCC Document ET Docket No. 03-108, Dec. 2003. [3] The SAFECOM Program, Department of Homeland Security, Statement of Requirements for Public Safety Wireless Communications and Interoperability, Version 1.0. March 10, 2004. [4] J.H. Reed, Software Radio: A Modern Approach to Radio Engineering, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2004. [5] P. Leaves, et al., Dynamic spectrum allocation in a multi-radio environment: concept and algorithm, 3G Mobile Communication Technologies, IEE Second International Conference on 3G Mobile Communications, pp. 53 57, 2001. [6] T. W. Rondeau, B. Le, C. J. Rieser, and C. W. Bostian, "Cognitive Radios with Genetic Algorithms: Intelligent Control of Software Defined Radios," Software Defined Radio Forum Technical Conference, Phoenix, AZ., pp. C-3 C-8, 2004. [7] C. J. Rieser, T. W. Rondeau, and C. W. Bostian, "Cognitive Radio Testbed: Further Details and Testing of a Distributed Genetic Algorithm Based Cognitive Engine for Programmable Radios," IEEE MILCOM, pp. 1437 1443, 2004. [8] IEEE Std 802.11a-1999. Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications: High Speed Physical layer in the 5GHz Band. [9] IEEE Std 802.11g/D1.1-2001, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) speei5cations: specifications: Further Higher-Speed Physical Layer Extension in the 2.4 GHz Band. [10] P. Gupta and P. R. Kumar, The capacity of wireless networks, IEEE Trans. Information Theory, vol. 46, pp. 388 404, Mar. 2000. [11] O. Tickoo and B. Sikdar, On the impact of IEEE 802.11 MAC on traffic characteristics,, IEEE Trans. Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 21, pp. 189 203, Feb. 2003. [1]

2) Simulation process and results CR-OFDM-PHY model: the AP's channel can be dynamically changed according to location and interference level, and the subscribers can pick an AP based on sensed SINR and load condition of each AP. The averaged subscriber link SINR is the parameter to evaluate the system performance, and the standard deviation of SINR for all the network nodes is the parameter to evaluate the balance or efficiency of the global spectrum management. The statistical results are obtained through a Monte Carlo simulation. Adaptation by the cognitive radio for link spectrum optimization is performed each iteration. The results of this preliminary experiment shown in Figure 4 illustrate a 20 dB improvement in the ISM bands SINR using our cognitive radio techniques. As stated before, the performance of network capacity and throughput can be directly calculated through analytical equations [10] [11]. Note that this simulation is constrained to the 802.11a/g-defined physical layer only thus the link performance improvement is quite limited. We plan on a standard-free WLAN physical layer simulation to experience a much better performance from an unleashed cognitive radio network. VI. CONCLUSIONS

Cognitive radio techniques offer a promising approach to dynamic spectrum allocation. A simple example shows a 20 dB SINR improvement for a wireless LAN using cognitive techniques in an interference environment over that provided by the current IEEE 802.11a service PHY standard. Spectrum cognition is essential to dynamic spectrum resource management at both node and network level. Our developing

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