Dynamic spectrum access for machine to machine communications: Opportunities, standards, and open issues

Cognitive radio can be applied to a multitude of domains, one of which is M2M communication. Specifically, M2M communication refers to communication between devices without human intervention. Hence, devices should be able to organize themselves and run the communication protocol autonomously. If cognitive radio is used, tasks such as dynamic spectrum access (DSA), spectrum sensing, and alike present additional challenges compared to traditional network, as all the decision framework should be implemented and automatized in the devices. In this chapter, we focus on DSA techniques for M2M. The main difference from other kinds of communication is relative both to the energy efficiency and to the low protocol overhead, as devices should run for long periods of time and run without human intervention. At first we present related work from literature, categorizing the different tasks devices which want to leverage DSA on M2M have to perform. At the end of the chapter, we present a proof of concept of a general framework, which can be applied to different scenario concerning M2M, encompassing all the spectrum management and measurement tasks M2M devices should generally perform. Finally, we derive open challenges and future research directions concerning this scenario.