  A large volume of research has been conducted in the cognitive radio (CR)
area the last decade. However, the deployment of a commercial CR network is yet
to emerge. A large portion of the existing literature does not build on real
world scenarios, hence, neglecting various important interactions of the
research with commercial telecommunication networks. For instance, a lot of
attention has been paid to spectrum sensing as the front line functionality
that needs to be completed in an efficient and accurate manner to enable an
opportunistic CR network architecture. This is necessary to detect the
existence of spectrum holes without which no other procedure can be fulfilled.
However, simply sensing (cooperatively or not) the energy received from a
primary transmitter cannot enable correct dynamic spectrum access. For example,
the low strength of a primary transmitter's signal does not assure that there
will be no interference to a nearby primary receiver. In addition, the presence
of a primary transmitter's signal does not mean that CR network users cannot
access the spectrum since there might not be any primary receiver in the
vicinity. Despite the existing elegant and clever solutions to the DSA problem
no robust, implementable scheme has emerged. In this paper, we challenge the
basic premises of the proposed schemes. We further argue that addressing the
technical challenges we face in deploying robust CR networks can only be
achieved if we radically change the way we design their basic functionalities.
In support of our argument, we present a set of real-world scenarios, inspired
by realistic settings in commercial telecommunications networks, focusing on
spectrum sensing as a basic and critical functionality in the deployment of
CRs. We use these scenarios to show why existing DSA paradigms are not amenable
to realistic deployment in complex wireless environments.
