Multiband Spectrum Access: Great Promises for Future Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio has been widely considered as one of the prominent solutions to tackle the spectrum scarcity. While the majority of existing research has focused on single-band cognitive radio, multiband cognitive radio represents great promises towards implementing efficient cognitive networks compared to single-based networks. Multiband cognitive radio networks (MB-CRNs) are expected to significantly enhance the network's throughput and provide better channel maintenance by reducing handoff frequency. Nevertheless, the wideband front-end and the multiband spectrum access impose a number of challenges yet to overcome. This paper provides an in-depth analysis on the recent advancements in multiband spectrum sensing techniques, their limitations, and possible future directions to improve them. We study cooperative communications for MB-CRNs to tackle a fundamental limit on diversity and sampling. We also investigate several limits and tradeoffs of various design parameters for MB-CRNs. In addition, we explore the key MB-CRNs performance metrics that differ from the conventional metrics used for single-band based networks.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures; published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Journal, Special Issue on Future Radio Spectrum Access, March 201

Improved Spectrum Mobility using Virtual Reservation in Collaborative Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio technology would enable a set of secondary users (SU) to opportunistically use the spectrum licensed to a primary user (PU). On the appearance of this PU on a specific frequency band, any SU occupying this band should free it for PUs. Typically, SUs may collaborate to reduce the impact of cognitive users on the primary network and to improve the performance of the SUs. In this paper, we propose and analyze the performance of virtual reservation in collaborative cognitive networks. Virtual reservation is a novel link maintenance strategy that aims to maximize the throughput of the cognitive network through full spectrum utilization. Our performance evaluation shows significant improvements not only in the SUs blocking and forced termination probabilities but also in the throughput of cognitive users.Comment: 7 pages, 10 figures, IEEE ISCC 201

Joint Cooperative Spectrum Sensing and MAC Protocol Design for Multi-channel Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we propose a semi-distributed cooperative spectrum sen sing (SDCSS) and channel access framework for multi-channel cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In particular, we c onsider a SDCSS scheme where secondary users (SUs) perform sensing and exchange sensing outcomes with ea ch other to locate spectrum holes. In addition, we devise the p -persistent CSMA-based cognitive MAC protocol integrating the SDCSS to enable efficient spectrum sharing among SUs. We then perform throughput analysis and develop an algorithm to determine the spectrum sensing and access parameters to maximize the throughput for a given allocation of channel sensing sets. Moreover, we consider the spectrum sensing set optimization problem for SUs to maxim ize the overall system throughput. We present both exhaustive search and low-complexity greedy algorithms to determine the sensing sets for SUs and analyze their complexity. We also show how our design and analysis can be extended to consider reporting errors. Finally, extensive numerical results are presented to demonstrate the sig nificant performance gain of our optimized design framework with respect to non-optimized designs as well as the imp acts of different protocol parameters on the throughput performance.Comment: accepted for publication EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 201

Cooperative wideband spectrum sensing with multi-bit hard decision in cognitive radio

Cognitive radio offers an increasingly attractive solution to overcome the underutilization problem. A sensor network based cooperative wideband spectrum sensing is proposed in this paper. The purpose of the sensor network is to determine the frequencies of the sources and reduced the total sensing time using a multi-resolution sensing technique. The final result is computed by data fusion of multi-bit decisions made by each cooperating secondary user. Simulation results show improved performance in energy efficiency