  As radio spectrum usage paradigm moving from the traditional command and
control allocation scheme to the open spectrum allocation scheme, wireless
networks meet new opportunities and challenges. In this article we introduce
the concept of cognitive wireless mesh (CogMesh) networks and address the
unique problem in such a network. CogMesh is a self-organized distributed
network architecture combining cognitive technologies with the mesh structure
in order to provide a uniform service platform over a wide range of networks.
It is based on dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and featured by self-organization,
self-configuration and self-healing. The unique problem in CogMesh is the
common control channel problem, which is caused by the opportunistic spectrum
sharing nature of secondary users (SU) in the network. More precisely, since
the channels of SUs are fluctuating according to the radio environment, it is
difficult to find always available global common control channels. This puts a
significant challenge on the network design. We develop the control cloud based
control channel selection and cluster based network formation techniques to
tackle this problem. Moreover, we show in this article that the swarm
intelligence is a good candidate to deal with the control channel problem in
CogMesh. Since the study of cognitive wireless networks (CWN) is still in its
early phase, the ideas provided in this article act as a catalyst to inspire
new solutions in this field.
