Radio spectrum needed for applications, such as mobile telephony, digital video broadcasting (DVB), wireless local area networks (WiFi), wireless sensor networks (ZigBee), and Internet of things, is enormous and continues to grow exponentially. Since spectrum is limited and the current usage can be inefficient, the cognitive radio paradigm has emerged to exploit the licensed and/or underutilized spectrum much more effectively. In this article, we present the motivation for and details of cognitive radio. A critical requirement for cognitive radio is the accurate, real‐time estimation of spectrum usage. We thus review various spectrum sensing techniques, propagation effects, interference modeling, spatial randomness, upper layer details, and several existing cognitive radio standards.