"The ICT industry is faced with a global challenge: develop new services with improved QoS, high QoE, and reduce its environmental impact. Clearly, there is a deep need of global efficiency, in the spectral domain, in the energy domain, and in the design of the radio.Indeed, wireless technology is rapidly proliferating into all aspects of computing and communication. The explosion of wireless applications and new services creates a very huge demand for more spectrums. However, most easily usable spectrum bands have been statically allocated. These considerations have motivated the research for breakthrough radio technologies. Cognitive radio system (CRS) offers the promise of being just this disruptive technology innovation.Although the theoretical research for CRS is blooming, hardware design is progressing at a much slower pace. A key bottleneck in CR continues to be the flexible radio frequency (RF) transceiver consuming very low power, which can easily be integrated with baseband processing. Another challenge is that cognitive algorithms and techniques should take into account the implementation constraints and requirements. Addressing these three main challenges is the motivation of this project.We propose to design, develop, and demonstrate the reception part of a CR platform that facilitates the realization of RF front-end functions for military and commercial communications systems. This CR receiver will be very power-efficient. We also propose enabling interference cancellation techniques and secure cooperative sensing algorithms, which will be implemented in this CR platform. It removes the need for custom-designed RF transceivers for each radio system. Moreover, this re-configurability allows upgrades to future standards and technologies in the field. This will be a disruptive technology; a nowadays-missing pillar of CRS, for the deployment of mesh and ad-hoc cognitive radio networks both for military and commercial applications."