Quality of service (QoS) in information and communications technology (ICT) and energy management in wireless communication are very attractive topics. Uses of cognitive radio technology as methods for dynamic spectral utilization are increasing more than ever. Naturally, mixing these two areas to compose a monograph not only exhibits a good choice, but also triggers the expectation of the reader to encounter fruitful technical discussions. The complexity of cognitive radio technology, with its technical elegance interwoven with critical topics like QoS and energy management, stimulates the reader to acquire plenty of insights from the book.

A well-written preface and a comprehensive introductory chapter are the vanguards of the book. Chapter 1 contains general discussions on versatile topics related to cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Some sections of the chapter are titled “Software-defined Radio and Cognitive Radio,” “Quality of Service (QoS),” “Channel Selection Techniques in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs),” “MAC Protocols for Cognitive Radio Networks,” and “Self-coexistence in Cognitive Radio Networks.” The chapter provides a useful general view of CRNs.

Despite having a good start, at chapter 2, the book unfortunately exhibits an unpleasant trend: it summarizes some papers, lacking any relevance, coherence, and integrity among the sections. Although the contents of the summaries are useful, an overarching theme to unify the sections cannot be recognized.

In the preface of the book, there is an emphasis on the provisional QoS framework. Chapter 3 describes the structure and details of the framework. With counting latency and throughput as the main criteria of QoS, a resource access scheme is provided to maintain a satisfactory level of these values.

It has been emphasized that the discussion about the cognitive radio environment would be based on a deterministic environment. In this approach, the availability of the channel would be determined via some data reservoir structures, like databases. Based on some inferences, a time-channel table is constructed as a reference for complementary discussions about channel switching methods in the framework. The discussion continues about the maximum throughput requirement, spectrum usage, media access, energy management, and self-coexistence, with some rise and fall in the quality of topics. But the main question is: where is the spirit and element of cognition? There is no sign of consideration of cognitive radio theory in the debates. There is no difference between the discussed networking issues and the ad hoc local area network (LAN)!

The book is not a high-value monograph, and its relevance to cognitive radio networking is not confirmed.