High-Level Design Approach for the Specification of Cognitive Radio Equipments Management APIs

Cognitive Radio (CR) equipments are radio devices that support the smart facilities offered by future cognitive networks. Even if several categories of equipments exist (terminal, base station, smart PDA, etc.), each requiring different processing capabilities (and associated cost or power consumption), these equipments have to integrate also a set of new capabilities as regards CR support, in addition to the usual radio signal processing elements. This implies real-time radio adaptation and sensing capabilities, but not only. We assert that it is necessary to add inside the radio equipments some management facilities for that purpose, and we propose in this paper a high-level design approach for the specification of a management framework. This includes a set of designing rules, based on hierarchical units that are distributed over three levels, and the associated APIs necessary to efficiently manage CR features inside a CR equipment. The proposed architecture is called HDCRAM (Hierarchical and Distributed Cognitive Architecture Management). HDCRAM is an extension of a former hierarchical and distributed reconfiguration management (HDReM) architecture, which is derived from our previous research on Software Defined Radio (SDR). The HDCRAM adds to the HDReM’s reconfiguration management facilities the necessary new management features, which enable the support of sensing and decision making facilities. It consists in the combination of one Cognitive Radio Management Unit (CRMU) with each Reconfiguration Management Unit (ReMU) distributed within the equipment. Each of these CRMU is in charge of the capture, the interpretation and the decision making according to its own goals. In this Cognitive Radio context, the term “decision” refers to the adaptation of the radio parameters to the equipment’s environment. This paper details the HDCRAM’s management functionality and structure. Moreover, in order to facilitate the early design phase of the management specification, which is new in radio design, HDCRAM has also been modeled with a meta-programming language based on UML. But beyond the first objective of high-level specification, we have also derived a simulator from the obtained meta-model, thanks to the use of an executable language. This gives the opportunity to specify the CR needs and play a wide variety of scenarios, in order to validate the CR equipment’s design. This approach provides high-level design facilities for the specification of cognitive management APIs inside a cognitive radio equipment.