Cognitive Radio, Spectrum Policy Specification, and the Semantic Web

No radio, even a cognitive one, is an island unto itself. Government regulations and policy will always exist to varying degrees regardless of cognitive radio technology capabilities. Therefore, a world of cognitive radios will be a world in which policy makers and radio designers will need to share some common understanding of this evolving technology. The Semantic Webthe ongoing World Wide Web Consortium W3C initiative to establish standards for machine-usable formal languages, knowledge representations, and methodsoffers an avenue for creating formal specifications of radio behaviors. Of particular relevance, the Rule Interchange Format RIF working group within the W3C is developing a standard that can accommodate exchange of rules among systems using different rule languages, possibly with differing formal semantics. As a motivating example this paper considers such an approach for the implementation of the Dynamic Frequency Selection DFS behavior which avoids radio bands occupied by active radar systems.