Embodied Cognition-Based Distributed Spectrum Sensing for Autonomic Wireless Systems

In the last decade, the usage of portable communication devices has continued to increase. Autonomic Communications (AC) represents a new frontier for mobile communications because they will allow autonomous and self-regulated network and communication protocols procedures. Dynamic observation of the spectrum and adaptive reactions of the autonomic terminal to wireless channel conditions are hence important problems in improving the spectrum efficiency as well as in allowing a complete access to the network wherever and whenever the user needs them. Cognitive Radio probably represents the most suitable paradigm for building communication terminals/devices for AC. In this chapter, after a tutorial overview of the current State of the Art on Cognitive Radio visions and on stand-alone and cooperative/distributed approaches to spectrum sensing, the general problem of spectrum sensing will be addressed. Then a new vision, based on Embodied Cognition will be presented together with a Distributed Spectrum Sensing algorithm that is formalized within the embodied framework. Results will illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.