Embodied Cognition-Based Distributed Spectrum Sensing for Autonomic Wireless Systems

In the past decade, the usage of portable communication devices hascontinued to increase. Autonomic communications (AC) represents anew frontier for mobile communications because they will allowautonomous and self-regulated network and communicationprotocols procedures. Dynamic observation of the spectrum andadaptive reactions of the autonomic terminal to wireless channelconditions are hence important problems in improving the spectrumefficiency as well as in allowing a complete access to the networkwherever and whenever the user needs them. Cognitive radio probablyrepresents the most suitable paradigm for building communicationterminals/devices for AC. In this chapter, after a tutorial overviewof the current state of the art on cognitive radio visions and onstand-alone and cooperative/distributed approaches to spectrumsensing, the general problem of spectrum sensing will be addressed.Then a new vision, based on embodied cognition will be presentedtogether with a distributed spectrum sensing algorithm that isformalized within the embodied framework. Results will illustratethe effectiveness of the proposed method.