Dynamic Spectrum Sharing & Cognitive Radio
Spectrum is shared by rules, and the rules change. A radio whose policy is compiled into its firmware has to be rebuilt every time they do — and it cannot act at all on a rule it was never shipped with. Every paper behind this page attacks one problem: making a radio act correctly on something it was not built to expect. Our answer, in the flagship's own terms: the radio must be “capable of interpreting and executing dynamically added policies, without any modification of the procedural code.” A policy change is a data change, not a software change.
The Challenge: Radios Cannot Pre-Agree on Everything
Node A asks Node B to switch to a modulation scheme. Node B does not have that component in its library. So A sends B a machine-processable description of it — and B must then formally prove, with its own reasoner, that the thing it just built locally really is an instance of what A asked for. That scenario, worked through a quadrature modulator, is the spine of the invited Proceedings of the IEEE tutorial that framed the language problem for cognitive radio.
The paper's move is to treat the need for a language as settled and ask only what kind of language it has to be: “we discuss not whether a language is needed to achieve the cognitive radio functionality but what kind of language it needs to be.” The answer follows from autonomy. A radio that must react to surprise will receive knowledge it did not have at design time; for it to act on that knowledge without a human, it must interpret that knowledge itself; and interpretation by machine requires a semantics a machine can process.
“the flexibility of the functionality of cognitive radio requires the inference power of a formal declarative language with formal, computer-processable semantics”
Be clear about what that paper is. It is an invited tutorial with a Northeastern University byline, and it evaluates languages by expressivity argument — showing, rung by rung, what each language can and cannot express. There is no system in it, no benchmark, and not one number. We cite it for the thesis, never for a result.
Our Approach: An Ontology, Policies, and a Reasoner Inside the Radio
Every system on this page shares one architecture: the radio carries a formal model of its own domain — the Cognitive Radio Ontology — and a reasoner that interprets policies as data against that model at runtime. What changes across the record is what the reasoner is asked to do: negotiate link parameters with a peer (2011, over the air on real radios), interpret spectrum-access policies that arrived after the radio shipped (2021, the flagship), or match device capabilities against a request (2022, the corpus’s one true benchmark).
Two systems anchor the record and must not be conflated: the 2011 system negotiates — request, refuse, counter-propose — while the 2021 Cognitive Radio Engine does not negotiate at all; its radios converge by independently running the same algorithm over the same shared policy. Each use-case page states which system did what, and what was never measured.
Use Cases
Cognitive Radio Systems
Radios that reason over a shared ontology — including the one that refused a peer’s request on its own local regulation, then counter-proposed. Demonstrated over the air on GNU Radio/USRP hardware.
Learn more →Policy-Based Spectrum Sharing
A policy change is a data change, not a software change: spectrum-access policies load as OWL data and the engine returns transmission opportunities, not bare verdicts.
Learn more →Capability Matching
What the semantics is actually worth, measured: the XML baseline never found one qualifying radio in three; the OWL matcher’s completeness came at a stated cost.
Learn more →Proof Points
One paper in this cluster carries a benchmark. The rest carry authority, architecture and a working radio — and we label each one for what it is, because a spectrum evaluator can check every claim on this page against an open-access PDF.
Named in the Forum's Own Minutes
The Wireless Innovation Forum's committee outbrief of 14 March 2014 records that “Mitch Kokar, representing VIStology, led a joint meeting of the Modeling Language for Mobility work Group with IEEE P1900.5 standards group” and that he gave the overview of the P1900.5.1 draft standard, which “included most of the submission by MLM/Winn Forum of August 2013.” The Cognitive Radio Ontology was approved as Forum work product WINNF-10-S-0007 in September 2010. What we do not claim: authorship of IEEE 1900.5 or 1900.5.2 (we co-authored papers about them), any chairmanship of 1900.5, Forum adoption of CRO2, or past performance on DARPA SSPARC.
The Language Question, in Proceedings of the IEEE
The invited tutorial that framed the problem for the field — co-authored by VIStology's president while at Northeastern — established by expressivity argument that cognitive radio requires “a formal declarative language with formal, computer-processable semantics”, proved that OWL alone cannot even pin down a component's wiring (“it is impossible to construct an OWL description …”), and rejected XML-without-semantics — the answer to every “why not just a schema?” ever asked in an RFP. It is an authority citation: no system, no experiment, not one number, and we cite it for nothing else.
Selected Publications
The peer-reviewed record behind VIStology's spectrum and cognitive-radio practice.
An Implementation of Collaborative Adaptation of Cognitive Radio Parameters Using an Ontology and Policy Based Approach
Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing 69(2-3):283-296 (2011)
View PDFTowards Collaborative and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing via Interpretation of Spectrum Access Policies
Applied Sciences 11(15):7056 (2021)
View PublicationMetrics-Based Comparison of OWL and XML for Representing and Querying Cognitive Radio Capabilities
Applied Sciences 12(23):11946 (2022)
View PublicationMapping Spectrum Consumption Models to Cognitive Radio Ontology for Automatic Inference
Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing 106(1):9-21
View PublicationProvenance, stated once. The 2009 and 2011 papers carry a Northeastern University byline and DARPA funding (the 2011 work through System Planning Corporation); VIStology neither performed nor held that work, and the Cognitive Radio Ontology is credited to the Wireless Innovation Forum's MLM Working Group. What is ours in them is the reasoner: BaseVISor is the engine those radios ran on. VIStology's own byline begins with the 2017 paper. Separately, and in a different country: the 2021 flagship was funded by Hanwha Systems and the Agency for Defense Development (ADD), Republic of Korea — a South Korean program, which names no U.S. sponsor. The 2022 study is a different paper with a different funder: its funding statement names the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Grant W911NF-14-C-0065).
Related
Make the Policy a Data Change
If your radios, your spectrum managers or your coordination systems have their rules compiled into them, we can help you take the rules out of the code — and put a reasoner where the assumptions used to be.
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