Cognitive scout node for communication in disaster scenarios

Abstract

The cognitive radio (CR) concept has appeared as a promising technology to cope with the spectrum scarcity caused by increased spectrum demand due to the emergence of new applications. CR can be an appropriate mean to establish self-organization and situation awareness at the radio interface, which is highly desired to manage unexpected situations that may happen in a disaster scenario. The scout node proposed in this paper is an extended concept based on a powerful CR node in a heterogeneous nodes environment which takes a leading role for highly flexible, fast, and robust establishment of cooperative wireless links in a disaster situation. This node should have two components: one is a passive sensor unit that collects and stores the technical knowledge about the electromagnetic environment in a data processing unit so-called "radio environment map" in the form of a dynamically updated database, and other is an active transceiver unit which can automatically be configured either as a secondary node for opportunistic communication or as a cooperative base station or access point for primary network in emergency communications. Scout solution can be viable by taking advantage of the technologies used by existing radio surveillance systems in the context of CR. Copyright © 2012 Rajesh K. Sharma et al.