The recent increasing interest in cognitive radio networks has motivated the study and development of new approaches capable of coping with the intrinsic challenges of this kind of network, such as dynamic spectrum availability, distributed and heterogeneous network architectures, and soaring complexity. The bio-inspired approaches, with appealing characteristics such as autonomy, adaptation and collective intelligence of collaborative individuals, have been extensively studied. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of bio-inspired approaches for cognitive radio networks, emphasizing their domains of application. Specifically, ant colony optimization and particle warm optimization are further investigated with examples and numerical simulation.cognitive radio networks, bio-inspired networking, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization
Citation:He Z Q, Niu K, Qiu T, et al. A bio-inspired approach for cognitive radio networks. Chin Sci Bull, 2012Bull, , 57: 37233730, doi: 10.1007 In the past decade, the cognitive radio technology, which was a term first coined by Mitola et al.[1], has attracted tremendous attention in the wireless communications to improve the spectrum-scarcity problem in static spectrumassignment policy. It facilitates the coexistence and efficiently exploits available spectrum in heterogeneous networks. However, the cognitive radio networks (CRN) faces many intractable challenges, such as sensing dynamic spectrum availability and complexity of distributed and heterogeneous network architectures, and hardware. These challenges are mainly caused by the discriminatory of the co-existence of secondary network within the primary network and the decentralized physical and access networking mechanisms of secondary network. For the sake of highly capable of autonomy and adaptation, bio-inspired approaches seem to be the promising methods to cope with the challenges in CRN, although they can be rather slow to adapt to environmental changes. Of course, the application of bio-inspired approaches in information technologies is not a new issue. A survey of the bio-inspired networking and its communication protocols and algorithms devised by looking at biology as a source of inspiration, and by mimicking the laws and dynamics governing these systems, is given by [2]. But most of the related works have been focused on optimization problems in network management, especially for the field of swarm intelligence such as ant colony optimization (ACO), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and so on. In order to excavate the scalability, adaptability, robustness and self-organization properties of biological systems, a detailed model description of bio-inspired approaches in every aspects of CRN, e.g. spectrum sensing and spectrum sharing, should be given.In general, this paper intends to introduce a general concept in bio-inspired approaches and show their possible application in the field of CRN. The main objective is to provide better understanding of the current state-of-the-art and the research is...