It is notable that two major news outlets have featured Cognitive Radio very recently. First, EE Times has a great piece in conjunction with the opening day 8 FEB 10 of the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. The article most pertinently says this about “Cognitive Radio”:

Defined by Joseph Mitola, the original coiner of the term as, “a really smart radio that would be self-aware, RF-aware, user-aware, and that would include language technology and machine vision along with a lot of high-fidelity knowledge of the radio environment,” cognitive radio has become a catch-all bucket for all sorts of radio intelligence. Got transmit power control? Definitely CR. Have adaptive frequency hopping? You’re in! Can your radio operate in more than one band? You’re a CR pioneer!

While all these ‘features’ are elements of what Mitola had in mind, the true vision goes way beyond these singular advancements into truly ‘intelligent’ radios that can operate in and avoid interference in any band based on a priori knowledge to predict what bands are open, where interference may come from and what the user’s application may be. Much of the intelligence for this will reside at a higher level in software, but the capability to act upon and take advantage of that intelligence depends on advancing the state of the art in radio design. That’s where ISSCC comes in.

Even with the various interpretations of the term Cognitive Radio, it is a very lively product development activity. CR is real today and is most readily understood as a variety of techniques used to install adaption and goal seeking into transceivers. These advances will clearly use bandwidth more effectively.

At the layman level, the San Jose Mercury News has an article about the exploding demand for bandwidth and how the FCC’s efforts to provide more spectrum can collide with other FCC initiatives. For example, spectrum can be more effectively allocated by various pricing mechanisms, but these in turn affect the proposed policy of “net neutrality”, in which telecom operators are forbidden to distinguish types of traffic for purposes of network management.