  The ability to intelligently utilize resources to meet the need of growing
diversity in services and user behavior marks the future of wireless
communication systems. Intelligent wireless communications aims at enabling the
system to perceive and assess the available resources, to autonomously learn to
adapt to the perceived wireless environment, and to reconfigure its operating
mode to maximize the utility of the available resources. The perception
capability and reconfigurability are the essential features of cognitive radio
while modern machine learning techniques project great potential in system
adaptation. In this paper, we discuss the development of the cognitive radio
technology and machine learning techniques and emphasize their roles in
improving spectrum and energy utility of wireless communication systems. We
describe the state-of-the-art of relevant techniques, covering spectrum sensing
and access approaches and powerful machine learning algorithms that enable
spectrum- and energy-efficient communications in dynamic wireless environments.
We also present practical applications of these techniques and identify further
research challenges in cognitive radio and machine learning as applied to the
existing and future wireless communication systems.
