Sensing for communication : the case of cognitive radio ( Invited Paper )

Sensor networks and communication usually intersect with the communication being used by the network to communicate sensed information for some application’s purposes. Cognitive radio provides an interesting twist: the sensed information is used to benefit the communication network, by collectively identifying and allocating the communication degrees of freedom that can be used by the network itself. In this paper, we consider the feasibility of designing such a sensor network. We show that such a senor network for sensing the primary is only feasible if the primary is large in scale with respect to the secondary system. When this is not the case (the scales of the two are comparable), each radio should be equipped with a sensor and location device.