Cognitive radio is a recent novel approach for the realization of intelligent and sophisticated wireless systems. Although the research and development on cognitive radio is still in the stage of infancy, there are significant interests and efforts towards realization of cognitive radio. Cognitive radio systems are envisioned to support context awareness and related systems. The context can be spectrum, environment, location, waveform, power and other radio resources. Significant amount of the studies related to cognitive radio in the literature focuses on the spectrum awareness since it is one of the most crucial features of cognitive radio systems. However, the rest of the features of cognitive radio such as location and environment awareness have not been investigated thoroughly. For instance, location aware systems are widespread and the demand for more advanced ones are growing. Therefore, the main objective of this dissertation is to develop an underlying location awareness architecture for cognitive radio systems, which is described as location awareness engine, in order to support goal driven and autonomous location aware systems. A cognitive radio conceptual model with location awareness engine and cycle is developed by inspiring from the location awareness features of human being and bat echolocation systems. Additionally, the functionalities of the engine are identified and presented. Upon providing the functionalities of location awareness engine, the focus is given to the development of cognitive positioning systems. Furthermore, range accuracy adaptation, which is a cognitive behavior of bats, is developed for cognitive positioning systems. In what follows, two main approaches are investigated in order to improve the performance of range accuracy adaptation method. The first approach is based on idea of improving the spectrum availability through hybrid underlay and overlay dynamic spectrum access method. On the other hand, the second approach emphasizes on spectrum utilization, where we study performance of range accuracy adaptation from both theoretical and practical perspectives considering whole spectrum utilization approach. Furthermore, we introduced a new spectrum utilization technique that is referred as dispersed spectrum utilization. The performance analysis of dispersed spectrum utilization approach is studied considering time delay estimation problem in cognitive positioning systems. Afterward, the performance of whole and dispersed spectrum utilization approaches are compared in the context of cognitive positioning systems. Finally, some representative advanced location aware systems for cognitive radio networks are presented in order to demonstrate some potential applications of the proposed location awareness engine in cognitive radio systems.