Wideband Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Spectrum sensing is an essential enabling functionality for cognitive radio networks to detect spectrum holes and opportunistically use the under-utilized frequency bands without causing harmful interference to legacy networks. This paper introduces a novel wideband spectrum sensing technique, called multiband joint detection, which jointly detects the signal energy levels over multiple frequency bands rather than consider one band at a time. The proposed strategy is efficient in improving the dynamic spectrum utilization and reducing interference to the primary users. The spectrum sensing problem is formulated as a class of optimization problems in interference limited cognitive radio networks. By exploiting the hidden convexity in the seemingly non-convex problem formulations, optimal solutions for multiband joint detection are obtained under practical conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed spectrum sensing schemes can considerably improve the system performance. This paper establishes important principles for the design of wideband spectrum sensing algorithms in cognitive radio networks

Compressed Sensing based Dynamic PSD Map Construction in Cognitive Radio Networks

In the context of spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks, collaborative spectrum sensing has been proposed as a way to overcome multipath and shadowing, and hence increasing the reliability of the sensing. Due to the high amount of information to be transmitted, a dynamic compressive sensing approach is proposed to map the PSD estimate to a sparse domain which is then transmitted to the fusion center. In this regard, CRs send a compressed version of their estimated PSD to the fusion center, whose job is to reconstruct the PSD estimates of the CRs, fuse them, and make a global decision on the availability of the spectrum in space and frequency domains at a given time. The proposed compressive sensing based method considers the dynamic nature of the PSD map, and uses this dynamicity in order to decrease the amount of data needed to be transmitted between CR sensors’ and the fusion center. By using the proposed method, an acceptable PSD map for cognitive radio purposes can be achieved by only 20 % of full data transmission between sensors and master node. Also, simulation results show the robustness of the proposed method against the channel variations, diverse compression ratios and processing times in comparison with static methods

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

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