This brief presents research results on social cognitive radio networks,
a transformational and innovative networking paradigm that promotes the
nexus between social interactions and cognitive radio networks. Along
with a review of the research literature, the text examines the key
motivation and challenges of social cognitive radio network design.
Three socially inspired distributed spectrum sharing mechanisms are
introduced: adaptive channel recommendation mechanism, imitation-based
social spectrum sharing mechanism, and evolutionarily stable spectrum
access mechanism. The brief concludes with a discussion of future
research directions which ascertains that exploiting social interactions
for distributed spectrum sharing will advance the state-of-the-art of
cognitive radio network design, spur a new line of thinking for future
wireless networks, and enable novel wireless service and applications.