Towards Cognitive Radio for emergency networks

Large parts of the assigned spectrum is underutilized while the increasing number of wireless multimedia applications leads to spectrum scarcity. Cognitive Radio is an option to utilize non-used parts of the spectrum that actually are assigned to primary services. The benefits of Cognitive Radio are clear when used in emergency situations. Current emergency services rely much on the public networks. This is not reliable in emergency situations, where the public networks can get overloaded. The major limitation of emergency networks is spectrum scarcity, since multimedia data in the emergency network needs a lot of radio resources. The idea of applying Cognitive Radio to the emergency network is to alleviate this spectrum shortage problem by dynamically accessing free spectrum resources. Cognitive Radio is able to work in different frequency bands and various wireless channels and supports multimedia services such as voice, data and video. A reconfigurable radio architecture is proposed to enable the evolution from the traditional software defined radio to Cognitive Radio.