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

Three-Event Energy Detection with Adaptive Threshold for Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Systems

Implementation of dynamic spectrum access (DSA) in cognitive radio (CR) systems requires the unlicensed secondary users (SU) to implement spectrum sensing to monitor the activity of the licensed primary users (PU). Energy detection (ED) is one of the most widely used methods for spectrum sensing in CR systems, and in this paper we present a novel ED algorithm with an adaptive sensing threshold. The three-event ED (3EED) algorithm for spectrum sensing is considered for which an accurate approximation of the optimal decision threshold that minimizes the decision error probability (DEP) is found using Newton’s method with forced convergence in one iteration. The proposed algorithm is analyzed and illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations that closely match the theoretical results and show that it outperforms the conventional ED (CED) algorithm for spectrum sensing

Protocols for dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks

Spectrum access protocols permit secondary users to transmit on frequency bands that are not being utilized by the primary owners. A cognitive radio that wishes to transmit in a band must first decide if the band is available (i.e., not being used by the owner) and then it must periodically re-evaluate the band\u27s availability once it begins transmitting in the band to ensure that a signal from a primary owner has not emerged. To accomplish these tasks, spectrum access protocols employ periodic sensing of the channel. Frequent sensing intervals are required to ensure that cognitive radios wishing to access the band are not disrupting transmissions by the owners of the band. Because spectrum sensing requires that radios cease transmission to observe the channel, the potential for throughput by the secondary users is reduced. A proposed enhancement to standard spectrum access protocols is presented that permits secondary users to monitor the frequency bands while communicating. This capability increases the amount of time that radios can transmit on the band and it decreases the amount of time required to detect the emergence of transmissions by a primary owner. Both improvements are obtained via a protocol that observes statistics obtained in the receiver of the cognitive radio during packet reception. The statistics are obtained with little or no additional hardware and do not require complicated channel measurements or pilot symbols. The proposed protocol for spectrum access is applicable to both single-link networks and multi-link cooperative networks

Cognitive radio networks : quality of service considerations and enhancements

The explosive growth of wireless and mobile networks, such as the Internet of Things and 5G, has led to a massive number of devices that primarily use wireless channels within a limited range of the radio frequency spectrum (RFS). The use of RFS is heavily regulated, both nationally and internationally, and is divided into licensed and unlicensed bands. While many of the licensed wireless bands are underutilised, useable unlicensed bands are usually overcrowded, making the efficient use of RFS one of the critical challenges faced by future wireless communication technologies. The cognitive radio (CR) concept is proposed as a promising solution for the underutilisation of useful RFS bands. Fundamentally, CR technology is based on determining the unoccupied licensed RFS bands, called spectrum white spaces or holes, and accessing them to achieve better RFS utilisation and transmission propagation. The holes are the frequencies unused by the licensed user, or primary user (PU). Based on spectrum sensing, a CR node, or secondary user (SU), senses the surrounding spectrum periodically to detect any potential PU transmission in the current channel and to identify the available spectrum holes. Under current RFS regulations, SUs may use spectrum holes as long as their transmissions do not interfere with those of the PU. However, effective spectrum sensing can introduce overheads to a CR node operation. Such overheads affect the quality of service (QoS) of the running applications. Reducing the sensing impact on the QoS is one of the key challenges to adopting CR technology, and more studies of QoS issues related to implementing CR features are needed. This thesis aims to address these QoS issues in CR while considered the enhancement of RFS utilisation. This study concentrates on the spectrum sensing function, among other CR functions, because of its major impact on QoS and spectrum utilisation. Several spectrum sensing methods are reviewed to identify potential research gaps in analysing and addressing related QoS implications. It has been found that none of the well-known sensing techniques is suitable for all the diverse QoS requirements and RFS conditions: in fact, higher accuracy sensing methods cause a significant QoS degradation, as illustrated by several simulations in this work. For instance, QoS degradation caused by high-accuracy sensing has not yet been addressed in the IEEE 802.11e QoS mechanism used in the proposed CR standard, IEEE 802.11af (or White-Fi). This study finds that most of the strategies proposed to conduct sensing are based on a fixed sensing method that is not adaptable to the changeable nature of QoS requirements. In contrast, this work confirms the necessity of using various sensing techniques and parameters during a CR node operation for better performance

Some MIMO applications in cognitive radio networks

In the last decade, the wireless communication technology has witnessed a rapid development, which led to a rapid growth in wireless applications and services. However, the radio spectrum resources scarcity resulting from using the traditional methods of fixed spectrum resources allocation has potential constraints on this wireless services rapid growth. Consequently, cognitive radio has been emerged as a possible solution for alleviating this spectrum scarcity problem by employing dynamic resource allocation strategies in order to utilize the available spectrum in a more efficient way so that finding opportunities for new wireless application services could be achieved. In cognitive radio networks, the radio spectrum resources utilization is improved by allowing unlicensed users, known as secondary users, to share the spectrum with licensed users, known as primary users, as long as this sharing do not induce harmful interference on the primary users, which completely entitled to utilize the spectrum. Motivated by MIMO techniques that have been used in practical systems as a means for high data rate transmission and a source for spatial diversity, and by its ease implementation with OFDM, different issues in multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) in both the uplink and downlink in the context of cognitive radio are studied in this thesis. More specifically, in the first thrust of this thesis, the spectrum spatial holes which could exist in an uplink MU-MIMO cell as a result of the possible free spatial dimensions resulted from the sparse activity of the primary users is studied; a modified sensing algorithm for these spectrum spatial holes that exploit both the block structure of the OFDM signals and the correlation of their activity states along time are proposed. The second thrust is concerned with cognitive radio relaying in the physical layer where the cognitive radio base station (CBS) relays the PU signal while transmitting its own signals to its SUs. We define secondary users with different priorities (different quality of service requirements); the different levels of priority for SUs are achieved by a newly proposed simple linear scheme based on zero forcing called Hierarchal Priority Zero Forcing scheme HPZF

Optimal detector randomization in cognitive radio receivers in the presence of imperfect sensing decisions

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent Univ., 2013.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2013.Includes bibliographical references leaves 36-39.In cognitive radio systems, spectrum sensing is one of the crucial tasks to be performed by secondary users in order to limit the interference to primary users. Therefore various spectrum sensing methods have been proposed in the literature. Once secondary users make a sensing decision, they adapt their communication parameters accordingly, which means that they perform communications when the channel is sensed as idle whereas they either do not transmit at all or transmit at a reduced power when the channel is sensed as busy. However, in practical systems, sensing decisions of secondary users are never perfect; hence, there can be cases in which the sensing decision is idle (busy) but primary user activity actually exists (does not exist). Therefore, the optimal design of secondary systems requires the consideration of imperfect sensing decisions. In this thesis, optimal detector randomization is developed for secondary users in a cognitive radio system in the presence of imperfect spectrum sensing decisions. Also, suboptimal detector randomization is proposed under the assumption of perfect sensing decisions. It is shown that the minimum average probability of error can be achieved by employing no more than four maximum a-posteriori probability (MAP) detectors at the secondary receiver. Optimal and suboptimal MAP detectors and generic expressions for their average probability of error are derived in the presence of possible sensing errors. Numerical results are presented and the importance of taking possible sensing errors into account is illustrated in terms of average probability of error optimization.Sezer, Ahmet DündarM.S