A Perspective of Cognitive Radio in Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey

In this Modernistic World folks want everything compact and mobile. As the wireless devices dominate the market, the necessity of wireless network and wireless communication has been increased. The Regulations of FCC (Federal Communications Commission) allocates 2.4 GHz to ISM band. It is used by major part of the population because technologies like Zigbee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi/802.11 and etc use this unlicensed band. As a result we are running out of spectrum. Shortage in the unlicensed band must be alleviated. The promising solution is Cognitive Radio (CR). In this paper, CR and its features are reviewed in detail. Basics of Software Defined Radio (SDR) and related technologies were discussed. This paper gives the overview about SDR and describes the functions and importance of cognitive Radio. Also the key research areas and innovative works on Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) have been analyzed. A new idea of integrating the existing strategies to effectively utilize the spectrum is proposed. Keywords—Spectrum, Cognitive Radio, Software Defined Radio, Spectrum Sensing and Dynamic Spectrum Access.