Integrating dynamic spectrum access and device-to-device via cloud radio access networks and cognitive radio

Funding information CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior) has provided funding for this research. Summary Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) can be integrated with Device-to-Device (D2D) communications to enable the exploitation of unused spectrum portions and to address the spectrum scarcity problem. Spectrum management mechanisms integrated into DSA and D2D allow low-power communications between User Equipments without interfering with licensed primary users. However, these mechanisms tend to be energy and processing intensive, being unfeasible to implement in User Equipments with strict battery and processing limitations. On the other hand, Cloud Radio Access Networks already leverage the virtually unlimited computing capacity of clouds for baseband processing functions. Thus, in this article, we propose the Cognitive Radio Device-to-Device (CRD2D) approach aiming to offload spectrum management functionality to the cloud taking advantage of Cloud Radio Access Networks architecture to support the integration of DSA and D2D.