Enabling location and environment awareness in cognitive radios

Location and environment awareness are two prominent features of cognitive radios and networks enabling them to interact with and learn the operating environment. A cognitive radio architecture with location and environment awareness engines is introduced in this paper. Architectural framework of both engines along with their components are presented. The proposed architecture is a promising model to support advanced and autonomous location and environment-aware applications (e.g. advanced location-based services (LBS)). Implementation options, design challenges, issues, and potential solutions for the realization of both engines are discussed. An underlying method for both engines, which is range accuracy adaptation, is presented. Finally, concluding remarks with future research directions are provided.