Architecture for an Open-source Cognitive Radio

OSCR, a framework for the implementation of a cognitive radio, is designed to facilitate the integration of a cognitive engine with one or more existing Software Communications Architecture (SCA) based radios. It consists of two components: a multiplexer, which acts as the cognitive engine’s point of control for each individual radio within the system, and an SCA resource within each radio, which translates between the radio’s native control API and the OSCR API. OSCR is designed to integrate multiple radios, which may all have differing capabilities, under a single cognitive engine. To demonstrate the usefulness of OSCR, used it to construct a cognitive radio composed of a basic SCA-compliant software radio and a cognitive engine designed to maximize channel capacity by monitoring channel statistics and varying radio parameters. Implementation details and results of experiments with this system are provided.