Enhanced Radio Network Management for 5G and Beyond: Leveraging RIS-enabled Cognitive Radio Networks

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) and Cognitive Radio (CR) offer solutions to improve spectral efficiency and mitigate spectrum scarcity. This article proposes a hybrid Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) paradigm combining Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA) and Concurrent Spectrum Access (CSA) models for spectrum allocation in RIS-supported CR environments. We frame the spectrum access issue as a game where each secondary user (SU) acts as a player to secure a communication channel. Our findings reveal that RIS technology significantly enhances spectrum allocation efficiency, quality of wireless communications, and spectrum sensing performance, providing high channel capacity and energy efficiency.