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

Over-the-air computation for cooperative wideband spectrum sensing and performance analysis

For sensor network aided cognitive radio, cooperative wideband spectrum sensing can distribute the sampling and computing pressure of spectrum sensing to multiple sensor nodes (SNs) in an efficient way. However, this may incur high latency due to distributed data aggregation, especially when the number of SNs is large. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative wideband spectrum sensing scheme using over-the-air computation. Its key idea is to utilize the superposition property of wireless channel to implement the summation of Fourier transform. This avoids distributed data aggregation by computing the target function directly. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed with imperfect synchronization between different SNs. Furthermore, a synchronization phase offset (SPO) estimation and equalization method is proposed. The corresponding performance after equalization is also derived. A working prototype based on universal software radio periphera (USRP) and Monte Carlo simulation is built to verify the performance of the proposed scheme

Comprehensive survey on quality of service provisioning approaches in cognitive radio networks : part one

Much interest in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) has been raised recently by enabling unlicensed (secondary) users to utilize the unused portions of the licensed spectrum. CRN utilization of residual spectrum bands of Primary (licensed) Networks (PNs) must avoid harmful interference to the users of PNs and other overlapping CRNs. The coexisting of CRNs depends on four components: Spectrum Sensing, Spectrum Decision, Spectrum Sharing, and Spectrum Mobility. Various approaches have been proposed to improve Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in CRNs within fluctuating spectrum availability. However, CRN implementation poses many technical challenges due to a sporadic usage of licensed spectrum bands, which will be increased after deploying CRNs. Unlike traditional surveys of CRNs, this paper addresses QoS provisioning approaches of CRN components and provides an up-to-date comprehensive survey of the recent improvement in these approaches. Major features of the open research challenges of each approach are investigated. Due to the extensive nature of the topic, this paper is the first part of the survey which investigates QoS approaches on spectrum sensing and decision components respectively. The remaining approaches of spectrum sharing and mobility components will be investigated in the next part

Compressed sensing based cyclic feature spectrum sensing for cognitive radios

Spectrum sensing is currently one of the most challenging design problems in cognitive radio. A robust spectrum sensing technique is important in allowing implementation of a practical dynamic spectrum access in noisy and interference uncertain environments. In addition, it is desired to minimize the sensing time, while meeting the stringent cognitive radio application requirements. To cope with this challenge, cyclic spectrum sensing techniques have been proposed. However, such techniques require very high sampling rates in the wideband regime and thus are costly in hardware implementation and power consumption. In this thesis the concept of compressed sensing is applied to circumvent this problem by utilizing the sparsity of the two-dimensional cyclic spectrum. Compressive sampling is used to reduce the sampling rate and a recovery method is developed for re- constructing the sparse cyclic spectrum from the compressed samples. The reconstruction solution used, exploits the sparsity structure in the two-dimensional cyclic spectrum do-main which is different from conventional compressed sensing techniques for vector-form sparse signals. The entire wideband cyclic spectrum is reconstructed from sub-Nyquist-rate samples for simultaneous detection of multiple signal sources. After the cyclic spectrum recovery two methods are proposed to make spectral occupancy decisions from the recovered cyclic spectrum: a band-by-band multi-cycle detector which works for all modulation schemes, and a fast and simple thresholding method that works for Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) signals only. In addition a method for recovering the power spectrum of stationary signals is developed as a special case. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed spectrum sensing algorithms can significantly reduce sampling rate without sacrifcing performance. The robustness of the algorithms to the noise uncertainty of the wireless channel is also shown

CYCLOSTATIONARY FEATURES BASED LOW COMPLEXITY MUTLIRESOLUTION SPECTRUM SENSING FOR COGNITVE RADIO APPLICATIONS

The demand for variety of services using wireless communication has grown remarkably in the past few many years, consequently causing an acute problem of spectrum scarcity. Today, it is one of the most challenging problems in modern wireless communication. To overcome this, the concept of cognitive radio has been proposed and this technology is fast maturing. The first and foremost function a cognitive radio must do is to sense the spectrum as accurately as possible and do it with least complexity. Among many techniques of spectrum sensing, the Multi-resolution Spectrum Sensing (MRSS) is a popular technique in recent literature. Various multi resolution techniques are used that include wavelet based spectrum estimation and spectral hole detection, wavelet based multi-resolution in analog domain and multi-resolution multiple antenna based detection. However, the basic idea is the same - the total bandwidth is sensed using coarse resolution energy detection, then, fine sensing is applied to the portion of interest. None of these techniques, however, use multi-resolution sensing using cyclostationary features for cognitive radio applications which are more reliable but computationally expensive. In this thesis, we suggest a cyclostationary features based low complexity multi-resolution spectrum sensing for cognitive radio applications. The proposed technique discussed in this thesis is inspired by the quickness of multi-resolution and the reliability of cyclostationary feature detection. The performance of the proposed scheme is primarily evaluated by its complexity analysis and by determining the minimum signal-to-noise ratio that gives 90% probability of correct classification. Both subjective and objective evaluation show that the proposed scheme is not only superior to the commonly used energy detection method but also to various multi-resolution sensing techniques as it relies on the robustness of cyclostationary feature detection. The results found are encouraging and the proposed algorithms are proved to be not only fast but also more robust and reliable

Spectrum cartography techniques, challenges, opportunities, and applications: A survey

The spectrum cartography finds applications in several areas such as cognitive radios, spectrum aware communications, machine-type communications, Internet of Things, connected vehicles, wireless sensor networks, and radio frequency management systems, etc. This paper presents a survey on state-of-the-art of spectrum cartography techniques for the construction of various radio environment maps (REMs). Following a brief overview on spectrum cartography, various techniques considered to construct the REMs such as channel gain map, power spectral density map, power map, spectrum map, power propagation map, radio frequency map, and interference map are reviewed. In this paper, we compare the performance of the different spectrum cartography methods in terms of mean absolute error, mean square error, normalized mean square error, and root mean square error. The information presented in this paper aims to serve as a practical reference guide for various spectrum cartography methods for constructing different REMs. Finally, some of the open issues and challenges for future research and development are discussed.publishedVersio