A Survey of Cognitive Radio Reconfigurable Antenna Design and Proposed Design using Genetic Algorithm

Cognitive radio network (CRN) is a recent paradigm of techniques for enhancing the quality of radio communication systems through the efficient utilization of frequency spectrum. It is characterized by overlay and underlay CR. Antennas designed for overlay CR must possess the capability to sense the channel and communicate over a portion of it. CR overlay antennas can be implemented as two-port, where one port supports UWB, and the other is narrowband and frequency reconfigurable. Further, they can be designed as one-port antenna, in which the same port is used for both sensing as well as communicating, and therefore should switch between wideband and narrowband operations. Evolutionary computation methods like the genetic algorithm (GA) are able to design new kinds of antennas with challenging and counterintuitive designs. A binary coded genetic algorithm can be utilized to optimize the geometry of an antenna to achieve maximum possible frequency bands with minimum number of switches for achieving a wideband performance from a single CR antenna.