Book reviews

Abstract

Reviews the book, "Cognitive Radio: Interoperability Through Waveform Reconfiguration (Lechowicz, L. and Kokar, M.; 2016). The proliferation of mobile and wireless devices and the complementary increase in their bandwidth demands are presenting real challenges to pushthe envelope of wireless communications. This has resulted in the building of new wireless technologies, such as software-defined radios (SDRs), cognitive radios (CRs), and MIMO antennas. There have also been accompanying improvements in software methods, such as network virtualization and protocol design to leverage multiple wireless interfaces simultaneously. CRs, SDRs, or CR+SDR are being explored in the research domain presently to meet the needs for higher spectrum bandwidth and wireless reliability. CRs are specifically designed to be aware of the radio environment in their vicinity and choose a frequency and bandwidth for communication that is allocated to a primary user (e.g., TV station), but is not in use at the moment. In that sense, CRs cannot only help improve wireless bandwidth utilization, but also help meet applications’ bandwidth demands with more success. The big challenge in CR communication is for the two communicating radios to talk to each other. In many cases, the two radios cannot communicate despite being unobstructed on account of them not having a set of common waveforms (QPSK, BPSK, etc.) to communicate with. This sometimes requires the radios to negotiate and one radio to inform the other radio device how to recreate the waveform to enable communication. This is termed dynamic auto configuration or interoperability. Often, such interoperability requires the creation of an ontology for describing the different parameters needed for efficient negotiation and also to perform accurate negotiation to learn the waveform. This book discusses the concepts that are needed for understanding and realizing a cognitive radio that implements dynamic interoperability via waveform reconfiguration. The book is organized into nine chapters with each chapter ending in useful references. This book provides a multi-faceted view of the CR and SDR domains and their overlap. It is a good book for beginners and also a decent reference book for practitioners.