From a Configuration Management to a Cognitive Radio Management of SDR Systems

Overview & Synopsis

This paper proposes a functional management architecture for Cognitive Radio systems. It relies on a previously defined configuration management architecture for multi-standard SDR systems, and complement it to support cognitive radio features. This paper explains the requirements of Cognitive Radio systems in terms of reconfiguration, smartness and sensing capabilities. A configuration management architecture capable of dealing with the hardware heterogeneity and a wide range of reconfiguration scenarios expected with SDR systems is presented. The management is distributed over the system and a hierarchical dependency is set on 3 layers, each having a different level of knowledge of the system and the associated hardware constraints of the elements it supervises. Then a cognitive management functional architecture is derived from the previous one, copying the 3 layers of hierarchy. The roles of the elements of each layer are discussed, as well as their respective interactions and their relationships with the elements of the configuration management architecture.