Abstract
One of the major challenges in cognitive and cooperative communication systems that support advanced coexistence technologies for radio resource usage optimization is efficient decision making. However, the high dynamicity of such communication environments, in conjunction with the existence of an increasing amount of diverse context information, result in decision making becoming a non-trivial issue. In this paper, we present a novel decision making framework for modern wireless communication environments. More specifically, the different steps of the decision making cycle and the role they play in the decision making process are presented, while the different fragments that constitute the notion of context, as well as their role and the way they interact with and influence the decision making steps are described in detail. Moreover, two case-studies, on interference management in heterogeneous networks and noise-robust and energy-efficient sensing, respectively, are presented, highlighting their compliance with the described decision making framework.