text: Traditional radio systems are strictly co-designed on the lower levels of the OSI stack for compatibility and efficiency. Although this has enabled the success of radio communications, it has also introduced lengthy standardization processes and imposed static allocation of the radio spectrum. Various initiatives have been undertaken by the research community to tackle the problem of artificial spectrum scarcity by both making frequency allocation more dynamic and building flexible radios to replace the static ones. There is reason to believe that just as computer vision and control have been overhauled by the introduction of machine learning, wireless communication can also be improved by utilizing similar techniques to increase the flexibility of wireless networks. In this work, we pose the problem of discovering low-level wireless communication schemes ex-nihilo between two agents in a fully decentralized fashion as a reinforcement learning problem. Our proposed approach uses policy gradients to learn an optimal bi-directional communication scheme and shows surprisingly sophisticated and intelligent learning behavior. We present the results of extensive experiments and an analysis of the fidelity of our approach.
  @cite_9: 
  @cite_13: Software radios are emerging as platforms for multiband multimode personal communications systems. Radio etiquette is the set of RF bands, air interfaces, protocols, and spatial and temporal patterns that moderate the use of the radio spectrum. Cognitive radio extends the software radio with radio-domain model-based reasoning about such etiquettes. Cognitive radio enhances the flexibility of personal services through a radio knowledge representation language. This language represents knowledge of radio etiquette, devices, software modules, propagation, networks, user needs, and application scenarios in a way that supports automated reasoning about the needs of the user. This empowers software radios to conduct expressive negotiations among peers about the use of radio spectrum across fluents of space, time, and user context. With RKRL, cognitive radio agents may actively manipulate the protocol stack to adapt known etiquettes to better satisfy the user's needs. This transforms radio nodes from blind executors of predefined protocols to radio-domain-aware intelligent agents that search out ways to deliver the services the user wants even if that user does not know how to obtain them. Software radio provides an ideal platform for the realization of cognitive radio.
  @cite_15: Cognitive radio is widely expected to be the next Big Bang in wireless communications. Spectrum sensing, that is, detecting the presence of the primary users in a licensed spectrum, is a fundamental problem for cognitive radio. As a result, spectrum sensing has reborn as a very active research area in recent years despite its long history. In this paper, spectrum sensing techniques from the optimal likelihood ratio test to energy detection, matched filtering detection, cyclostationary detection, eigenvalue-based sensing, joint space-time sensing, and robust sensing methods are reviewed. Cooperative spectrum sensing with multiple receivers is also discussed. Special attention is paid to sensing methods that need little prior information on the source signal and the propagation channel. Practical challenges such as noise power uncertainty are discussed and possible solutions are provided. Theoretical analysis on the test statistic distribution and threshold setting is also investigated.
summary: Since Widrow's early work, research into the use of neural architectures and machine learning techniques to address problems in communications has taken off in many directions. Ibnkahla's comprehensive review of the intersection of communications and machine learning @cite_9 is a testament to the impressive efforts made in this area of research. His survey lists various learning-based approaches to adaptive equalization, nonlinear channel modeling, coding, error correcting codes, spread spectrum applications, network planning, modulation detection and many more. Due to the vastness of this field, we refer the reader to the review. Research in making radio agents adaptive to achieve cooperative goals began in 1999, when Mitola introduced the concept of the cognitive radio @cite_13 . His proposal was for cognitive radios to use model-based reasoning to achieve competency in radio related tasks using both supervised and unsupervised learning. A review of cognitive radio work in years after that is in @cite_15 .