Cognitive Wireless Networks: Concepts, Methodologies and Visions Inspiring the Age of Enlightenment of Wireless Communications

As wireless networks become pervasive, highly populated and increasingly complex, the essential preconditions for exploiting rich interactions among mobile devices are better fulfilled. Today, these trends are giving rise to new communications paradigms making use of cooperation and cognition as the main underlying principles. Cognition, together with its complementary principle cooperation, confer to the wireless networks some degree of consciousness or understanding about their own existence, such as internal structure, capabilities, relationships to the outside world, limitations, current use of radio resources and many more. Current wireless networks are aware of their surrounding environment to a very limited extent, but in future wireless networks this capability will be highly developed, as a consequence of exploiting jointly cooperative and cognitive principles. Especially for cooperative wireless networks, where the communication scenario is highly dynamic, the mobile devices need to adapt their capabilities in a flexible manner, taking advantage of cognitive principles.