On Integrating Radio, Computing, and Application Resource Management in Cognitive Radio Systems

Cognitive radio is an emerging concept that facilitates the intelligent usage of radio resources in heterogeneous radio environments. It automates the reconfiguration of software-defined radio (SDR) platforms, which stand for reconfigurable mobile terminals and network elements. This paper introduces a novel approach to resource management in cognitive radio. We call it integrated resource management (IRM) because it integrates the radio resource or spectrum management, the computing resource management of SDR platforms, and the application resource management of SDR applications, which define a platform's radio functionality. Our cognitive radio system thus executes three cognitive cycles: the radio, the computing, and the application cycles. We present a general framework that facilitates the introduction of integrated resource management algorithms. Simulation results, based on a heterogeneous radio scenario and a simple integrated resource management algorithm, indicate the achievable improvements of our proposal.