COST-TERRA, a forum spearheading a regulatory breakthrough for the European development of Cognitive Radio and Software Defined Radio (CR/SDR) technologies, is promoting more active trials of CR to identify its best feasible application, guide policy-makers to open a regulatory framework and facilitate development of the technology.

After assessing several projects and developments in this area, COST-TERRA will collaborate with its sister, COST Action IC0902, and FP7's CREW project in promoting the importance of real-life CR testing and building real-life CR deployment scenarios into the CR testing programmes. Additionally, COST-TERRA has begun to outline a proposal to regulators on dedicating a pilot frequency band for a set of most attractive CR deployment scenarios.

Such a pilot band would provide regulatory certainty for the industry to make the necessary investments in the trial of this novel, and yet unproven technology. In order to further develop this project, COST-TERRA will work on better defining this proposal for the pilot CR band with the aim of exploiting the established liaisons with the EU regulators, such as the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) and the European Commission.