  With the rapid growth of demand for ever-increasing data rate, spectrum
resources have become more and more scarce. As a promising technique to
increase the efficiency of the spectrum utilization, cognitive radio (CR)
technique has the great potential to meet such a requirement by allowing
un-licensed users to coexist in licensed bands. In conventional CR systems, the
spectrum sensing is performed at the beginning of each time slot before the
data transmission. This unfortunately results in two major problems: 1)
transmission time reduction due to sensing, and 2) sensing accuracy impairment
due to data transmission. To tackle these problems, in this paper we present a
new design paradigm for future CR by exploring the full-duplex (FD) techniques
to achieve the simultaneous spectrum sensing and data transmission. With FD
radios equipped at the secondary users (SUs), SUs can simultaneously sense and
access the vacant spectrum, and thus, significantly improve sensing
performances and meanwhile increase data transmission efficiency. The aim of
this article is to transform the promising conceptual framework into the
practical wireless network design by addressing a diverse set of challenges
such as protocol design and theoretical analysis. Several application scenarios
with FD enabled CR are elaborated, and key open research directions and novel
algorithms in these systems are discussed.
