A Policy Reasoner for Policy-based Dynamic Spectrum Access

Policy-based dynamic spectrum access is one of the spectrum access models being considered by regulators and researchers for regulating the behavior of cognitive radios. This approach to spectrum access decouples the policyrelated components (i.e., policy management, provisioning, and reasoning) from the radio platform. In policy-based spectrum access, the policy reasoner plays a critical role—it assists in policy enforcement and carries out a number of tasks related to policy analysis and processing. One of the most crucial tasks performed by the policy reasoner is evaluating radio transmission requests in relation to a set of active policies. This paper describes the design process and architecture of a policy reasoner. Key features of the proposed policy reasoner include: (1) policy conflict detection and resolution; and (2) ability to process underspecified transmission requests and compute the corresponding constraints.