Benefits brought by cognitive radio for the next generation cellular networks: A perspective from industry

With the explosion of network traffic in the future IMT-advanced system, the revenue for mobile operators is not increasing anywhere near as fast as the network traffic. This means that operators must innovate, bring costs down, and leverage their networks as much as possible, given already significant investments made. Cognitive radio will solve such economic challenges on deployment and maintenance cost with two aspects. One is related to flexible spectrum usage with the used frequency range, coverage and the backbone network, such as TV white space usage. The other is that cognitive radio improves the next generation cellular network from channel adaptive to be environment aware, as in Self-Optimized Networks (SON). Cognitive radio will make the mobile communication paradigm become more and more personal with higher spectrum utilization efficiency in multiple dimensions than in the past. In this paper, we mainly focus on the benefit brought by cognitive radio for the next generation cellular networks, such as Long Term Evolution advanced or 802.16 m, and how to achieve this on application solutions and techniques. We present our initial results on these key techniques. We expect this paper to ignite the further enhanced topics on cognitive radio in IMT-advanced research and standard activities.