Introduction to IEEE P1900.4 Activities

The Project Authorization Request (PAR) for the IEEE P1900.4 Working Group (WG), under the IEEE Standards Coordinating Committee 41 (SCC41) was approved in December 2006, leading to this WG being officially launched in February 2007 [1]. The scope of this standard is to devise a functional architecture comprising building blocks to enable coordinated network-device distributed decision making, with the goal of aiding the optimization of radio resource usage, including spectrum access control, in heterogeneous wireless access networks. This paper introduces the activities and work under progress in IEEE P1900.4, including its scope and purpose in Sects. 1 and 2, the reference usage scenarios where the standard would be applicable in Sect. 4, and its current system architecture in Sect. 5. key words: IEEE standardization, cognitive radio, network architecture, reconfiguration, heterogeneous radio access networks, distributed radio resource management