Patent ID: 8744476

Claim:
A radio node in a radio network, comprising: signal processing hardware; radio frequency (RF) transceiver hardware; and a smart spectrum sensor for feature detection capable of detecting multiple features including at least one of: specific pilot signals, specific modulations, spectral widths, and symbol durations, wherein the smart spectrum sensor implements an artificial neural network, wherein said radio node is one of opportunistic secondary communicators in the radio network, and the smart spectrum sensor of said radio node is a part of a distributed feature detection system utilized by the opportunistic secondary communicators to detect communication opportunities, wherein said distributed feature detection system utilizes the opportunistic secondary communicators to distribute computing workload of detection and classification with the smart spectrum sensor of each secondary communicator targeting a smaller subset of detectable primary communicators, the secondary communicators exchanging a local channel metric for identifying communication opportunities without creating interference for a primary communicator in the radio network, wherein said exchanging is supported by a route management protocol of the radio node, and wherein said distributed feature detection system is a time-coordinated distributed feature detection system.