Abstract: Increasingly complex application environments and diverse users’ needs have resulted in the complicated management of network systems that is short of ability of intelligent self-adaptation. In response to actual demand, Cognitive Network(CN) was proposed, which is considered as the inevitable trend of the next generation networks. Since CN come into the people's vision, it has shown a great role in improving the overall performance of networks and end-to-end goals, as well as simplifying network management Related work was summarized in depth in this paper firstly,and then 3 typical CN architectures were introduced briefly. Based upon the analysis of related work, a new more general framework called as Super-NET was proposed, which will lay the foundation for building theoretical model of CN. At last,problems and challenges facing by CN as well as direction of development were introduced briefly.

Key words: Cognitive networks, Super-NE I}, Autonomic computing, Cognitive cycle, Next generation networks