Europe is in the midst of a communications revolution facilitated, in part, by advances in wireless communications, such as wireless internet and leading to the next generation of systems. Both power and spectrally efficient techniques are major design objectives for next generation wireless networks. Recent studies have indicated that many licensed frequency bands remain unused 90% of the time. In order to address this inefficiency, spectrum regulatory authorities have introduced a secondary market initiative to better utilize the licensed spectrum by removing the regulatory barriers. This introduces the concept of dynamic spectrum licensing rendered possible by a set of techniques branded in short as "Cognitive Radio" (CR). While appealing as a theoretical concept, CR still faces a number of serious challenges that prevent it from wide commercial adoption. The main core challenges that we plan to tackle are 1) the problem of distributed interference awareness and 2) the problem of communicating over as many as possible concurrent channels in the same communication spectrum with minimal mutual interference, enabled by smart antenna systems. These have been major showstoppers for CR, resulting in a low confidence that such unlicensed systems can indeed operate in a transparent way avoiding interference with each other as well as licensed systems. We plan to address these problems by a combination of distributed intelligence (via a powerful MAC protocol) and advanced signal processing, including intelligent interference detection and smart antenna processing, tailored to the network architecture at hand. In order to validate the developed techniques, we will 1) derive (information theoretic) benchmarks for the maximum spectrum efficiency bounds and 2) develop an experimental platform where the developed techniques will be put at test. The platform will consist of configurable hardware components with various signal processing and distributed MAC capabilities.