Cognitive radio & networks in the perspective of industrial wireless communications

Abstract

Industrial wireless applications typically operate in heterogeneous network environments and require high reliability and strictly guaranteed low latency at moderate data rates. In this contribution we provide an insight into present industrial wireless communication standards and identify the challenges they will have to accomplish in order to achieve business success. We concentrate on the coexistence problem among heterogeneous collocated wireless networks, originated from the ever-increasing demand for spectrum in license exempt bands. We argue that the cognitive radio & networks paradigm has the potential to solve these problem by allowing for near real-time, efficent, and fair radio resource management. So, the next step is to concetrate on the design of flexible and agile radio resource allocation protocols capable to coordinate the conflicting spectrum interest of heterogeneous users. The comprehensive study of heterogeneous, conflicting, cognitive systems (radios or networks) demand powerful analysis and simulation tools. We present game theory as a broadly accepted analytical framework and introduce our parallel distributed simulation engine which is able to cope with the high computational complexity of such problems.