Cognitive-Radio-Based Internet of Things: Applications, Architectures, Spectrum Related Functionalities, and Future Research Directions

Recent research and technology trends are shifting toward IoT and CRNs. However, we think that the things-oriented, Internet-oriented, and semantic-oriented versions of IoT are meaningless if IoT objects are not equipped with cognitive radio capability. Equipping IoT objects with CR capability has lead to a new research dimension of CR-based IoT. In this article, we present an overview of CR-based IoT systems. We highlight potential applications of CR-based IoT systems. We survey architectures and frameworks of CR-based IoT systems. We furthermore discuss spectrum-related functionalities for CR-based IoT systems. Finally, we present open issues, research challenges, and future direction for these CR-based IoT networks.