Homogeneous Test-bed for Cognitive Radio

In the current frequency allocation scheme, the radio spectrum is found to be heavily underutilized in time, frequency and space dimensions or any of their combination. To improve spectrum utilization, the unused contiguous or non-contiguous portion of the radio spectrum (spectrum hole) can be accessed opportunistically using cognitive radio technology provided it is interference free to the local users of the network. To reliably detect the spectrum holes, which is necessary to limit the interference, cognitive radio is required to have high time and frequency resolutions to detect radio technologies (e.g. GSM 900, 2.4 GHz WLAN) at the packet level in the transmitted channel to avoid misinterpretation of occupancy states in time and frequency. In addition, having high sensitivity and instantaneous dynamic range can enable cognitive radio to detect weak received signals and their detection in the presence of strong received signals. Besides these requirements, a large sensing bandwidth can increase the chances to find spectrum holes in multiple radio technologies concurrently. A chirp channel sounder receiver has been developed according to the aforementioned requirements with a bandwidth of 750 MHz to provide reliable detection of received signals in two frequency ranges; 1) 250 MHz to 1 GHz, 2) 2.2 GHz to 2.95 GHz. The developed receiver is capable of finding spectrum holes having a duration of 204.8 μs and a transmitted channel bandwidth up to 200 kHz. To explore the spectrum holes in the space dimensions, six chirp channel sounder receivers have been developed to form a homogeneous test-bed, which can be deployed and controlled independently. To experimentally validate the ability of the built receiver, short term spectrum occupancy measurements have been conducted to monitor 2.4 GHz WLAN traffic from a real wireless network to quantify the spectrum utilization and duration of spectrum holes in the time domain. It has been found that the radio spectrum is underutilized and empirical distribution of the duration of the spectrum hole can be modelled using lognormal and gamma distributions for prediction using a two state continuous time semi-Markov model. To experimentally validate the receiver’s capabilities in both the supported frequency ranges, long term spectrum occupancy measurements with 750 MHz sensing bandwidth have been performed and received signals have been detected at frame or packet level to quantify spectrum utilization. It has been found that the radio spectrum is highly underutilized at the measurement location and exhibits significant amount of spectrum holes in both time and frequency. To experimentally validate the functionalities of the homogeneous test-bed, short term spectrum occupancy have been performed to monitor 2.4 GHz WLAN traffic from a real wireless network. The experiment has been conducted using multiple receivers to quantify the amount of cooperation individual or multiple cognitive radio users can provide for reliable detection of spectrum holes in time, frequency and space. It has been found that the space dimension influences strongly the statistics of cooperation parameters

Antennas and Propagation Aspects for Emerging Wireless Communication Technologies

The increasing demand for high data rate applications and the delivery of zero-latency multimedia content drives technological evolutions towards the design and implementation of next-generation broadband wireless networks. In this context, various novel technologies have been introduced, such as millimeter wave (mmWave) transmission, massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes in order to support the vision of fifth generation (5G) wireless cellular networks. The introduction of these technologies, however, is inextricably connected with a holistic redesign of the current transceiver structures, as well as the network architecture reconfiguration. To this end, ultra-dense network deployment along with distributed massive MIMO technologies and intermediate relay nodes have been proposed, among others, in order to ensure an improved quality of services to all mobile users. In the same framework, the design and evaluation of novel antenna configurations able to support wideband applications is of utmost importance for 5G context support. Furthermore, in order to design reliable 5G systems, the channel characterization in these frequencies and in the complex propagation environments cannot be ignored because it plays a significant role. In this Special Issue, fourteen papers are published, covering various aspects of novel antenna designs for broadband applications, propagation models at mmWave bands, the deployment of NOMA techniques, radio network planning for 5G networks, and multi-beam antenna technologies for 5G wireless communications

Intelligent Approaches for Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in the Cognitive Radio Network

The cognitive radio (CR) is evolved as the promising technology to alleviate the spectrum scarcity issues by allowing the secondary users (SUs) to use the licensed band in an opportunistic manner. Various challenges need to be addressed before the successful deployment of CR technology. This thesis work presents intelligent resource allocation techniques for improving energy efficiency (EE) of low battery powered CR nodes where resources refer to certain important parameters that directly or indirectly affect EE. As far as the primary user (PU) is concerned, the SUs are allowed to transmit on the licensed band until their transmission power would not cause any interference to the primary network. Also, the SUs must use the licensed band efficiently during the PU’s absence. Therefore, the two key factors such as protection to the primary network and throughput above the threshold are important from the PU’s and SUs’ perspective, respectively. In deployment of CR, malicious users may be more active to prevent the CR users from accessing the spectrum or cause unnecessary interference to the both primary and secondary transmission. Considering these aspects, this thesis focuses on developing novel approaches for energy-efficient resource allocation under the constraints of interference to the PR, minimum achievable data rate and maximum transmission power by optimizing the resource parameters such as sensing time and the secondary transmission power with suitably selecting SUs. Two different domains considered in this thesis are the soft decision fusion (SDF)-based cooperative spectrum sensing CR network (CRN) models without and with the primary user emulation attack (PUEA). An efficient iterative algorithm called iterative Dinkelbach method (IDM) is proposed to maximize EE with suitable SUs in the absence of the attacker. In the proposed approaches, different constraints are evaluated considering the negative impact of the PUE attacker on the secondary transmission while maximizing EE with the PUE attacker. The optimization problem associated with the non-convex constraints is solved by our proposed iterative resource allocation algorithms (novel iterative resource allocation (NIRA) and novel adaptive resource allocation (NARA)) with suitable selection of SUs for jointly optimizing the sensing time and power allocation. In the CR enhanced vehicular ad hoc network (CR-VANET), the time varying channel responses with the vehicular movement are considered without and with the attacker. In the absence of the PUE attacker, an interference-aware power allocation scheme based on normalized least mean square (NLMS) algorithm is proposed to maximize EE considering the dynamic constraints. In the presence of the attacker, the optimization problem associated with the non-convex and time-varying constraints is solved by an efficient approach based on genetic algorithm (GA). Further, an investigation is attempted to apply the CR technology in industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band through spectrum occupancy prediction, sub-band selection and optimal power allocation to the CR users using the real time indoor measurement data. Efficacies of the proposed approaches are verified through extensive simulation studies in the MATLAB environment and by comparing with the existing literature. Further, the impacts of different network parameters on the system performance are analyzed in detail. The proposed approaches will be highly helpful in designing energy-efficient CRN model with low complexity for future CR deployment

Survey of Spectrum Sharing for Inter-Technology Coexistence

Increasing capacity demands in emerging wireless technologies are expected to be met by network densification and spectrum bands open to multiple technologies. These will, in turn, increase the level of interference and also result in more complex inter-technology interactions, which will need to be managed through spectrum sharing mechanisms. Consequently, novel spectrum sharing mechanisms should be designed to allow spectrum access for multiple technologies, while efficiently utilizing the spectrum resources overall. Importantly, it is not trivial to design such efficient mechanisms, not only due to technical aspects, but also due to regulatory and business model constraints. In this survey we address spectrum sharing mechanisms for wireless inter-technology coexistence by means of a technology circle that incorporates in a unified, system-level view the technical and non-technical aspects. We thus systematically explore the spectrum sharing design space consisting of parameters at different layers. Using this framework, we present a literature review on inter-technology coexistence with a focus on wireless technologies with equal spectrum access rights, i.e. (i) primary/primary, (ii) secondary/secondary, and (iii) technologies operating in a spectrum commons. Moreover, we reflect on our literature review to identify possible spectrum sharing design solutions and performance evaluation approaches useful for future coexistence cases. Finally, we discuss spectrum sharing design challenges and suggest future research directions

Spectrum sensing and occupancy prediction for cognitive machine-to-machine wireless networks

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfil ment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) introduces an additional challenge to the existing spectrum under-utilisation problem as large scale deployments of thousands devices are expected to require wireless connectivity. Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) has been proposed as a means of improving the spectrum utilisation of wireless systems. Based on the Cognitive Radio (CR) paradigm, DSA enables unlicensed spectrum users to sense their spectral environment and adapt their operational parameters to opportunistically access any temporally unoccupied bands without causing interference to the primary spectrum users. In the same context, CR inspired Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications have recently been proposed as a potential solution to the spectrum utilisation problem, which has been driven by the ever increasing number of interconnected devices. M2M communications introduce new challenges for CR in terms of operational environments and design requirements. With spectrum sensing being the key function for CR, this thesis investigates the performance of spectrum sensing and proposes novel sensing approaches and models to address the sensing problem for cognitive M2M deployments. In this thesis, the behaviour of Energy Detection (ED) spectrum sensing for cognitive M2M nodes is modelled using the two-wave with dffi use power fading model. This channel model can describe a variety of realistic fading conditions including worse than Rayleigh scenarios that are expected to occur within the operational environments of cognitive M2M communication systems. The results suggest that ED based spectrum sensing fails to meet the sensing requirements over worse than Rayleigh conditions and consequently requires the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to be increased by up to 137%. However, by employing appropriate diversity and node cooperation techniques, the sensing performance can be improved by up to 11.5dB in terms of the required SNR. These results are particularly useful in analysing the eff ects of severe fading in cognitive M2M systems and thus they can be used to design effi cient CR transceivers and to quantify the trade-o s between detection performance and energy e fficiency. A novel predictive spectrum sensing scheme that exploits historical data of past sensing events to predict channel occupancy is proposed and analysed. This approach allows CR terminals to sense only the channels that are predicted to be unoccupied rather than the whole band of interest. Based on this approach, a spectrum occupancy predictor is developed and experimentally validated. The proposed scheme achieves a prediction accuracy of up to 93% which in turn can lead to up to 84% reduction of the spectrum sensing cost. Furthermore, a novel probabilistic model for describing the channel availability in both the vertical and horizontal polarisations is developed. The proposed model is validated based on a measurement campaign for operational scenarios where CR terminals may change their polarisation during their operation. A Gaussian approximation is used to model the empirical channel availability data with more than 95% confi dence bounds. The proposed model can be used as a means of improving spectrum sensing performance by using statistical knowledge on the primary users occupancy pattern

Spectrum measurement, sensing, analysis and simulation in the context of cognitive radio

The radio frequency (RF) spectrum is a scarce natural resource, currently regulated locally by national agencies. Spectrum has been assigned to different services and it is very difficult for emerging wireless technologies to gain access due to rigid spectmm policy and heavy opportunity cost. Current spectrum management by licensing causes artificial spectrum scarcity. Spectrum monitoring shows that many frequencies and times are unused. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a potential solution to low spectrum efficiency. In DSA, an unlicensed user opportunistically uses vacant licensed spectrum with the help of cognitive radio. Cognitive radio is a key enabling technology for DSA. In a cognitive radio system, an unlicensed Secondary User (SU) identifies vacant licensed spectrum allocated to a Primary User (PU) and uses it without harmful interference to the PU. Cognitive radio increases spectrum usage efficiency while protecting legacy-licensed systems. The purpose of this thesis is to bring together a group of CR concepts and explore how we can make the transition from conventional radio to cognitive radio. Specific goals of the thesis are firstly the measurement of the radio spectrum to understand the current spectrum usage in the Humber region, UK in the context of cognitive radio. Secondly, to characterise the performance of cyclostationary feature detectors through theoretical analysis, hardware implementation, and real-time performance measurements. Thirdly, to mitigate the effect of degradation due to multipath fading and shadowing, the use of -wideband cooperative sensing techniques using adaptive sensing technique and multi-bit soft decision is proposed, which it is believed will introduce more spectral opportunities over wider frequency ranges and achieve higher opportunistic aggregate throughput.Understanding spectrum usage is the first step toward the future deployment of cognitive radio systems. Several spectrum usage measurement campaigns have been performed, mainly in the USA and Europe. These studies show locality and time dependence. In the first part of this thesis a spectrum usage measurement campaign in the Humber region, is reported. Spectrum usage patterns are identified and noise is characterised. A significant amount of spectrum was shown to be underutilized and available for the secondary use. The second part addresses the question: how can you tell if a spectrum channel is being used? Two spectrum sensing techniques are evaluated: Energy Detection and Cyclostationary Feature Detection. The performance of these techniques is compared using the measurements performed in the second part of the thesis. Cyclostationary feature detection is shown to be more robust to noise. The final part of the thesis considers the identification of vacant channels by combining spectrum measurements from multiple locations, known as cooperative sensing. Wideband cooperative sensing is proposed using multi resolution spectrum sensing (MRSS) with a multi-bit decision technique. Next, a two-stage adaptive system with cooperative wideband sensing is proposed based on the combination of energy detection and cyclostationary feature detection. Simulations using the system above indicate that the two-stage adaptive sensing cooperative wideband outperforms single site detection in terms of detection success and mean detection time in the context of wideband cooperative sensing

Heterogeneous spectrum sensing: challenges and methodologies

Distributed sensing is commonly used to obtain accurate spectral information over a large area. More and more heterogeneous devices are being incorporated in distributed sensing with the aim of obtaining more flexible sensing performance at lower cost. Although the concept of combining the strengths of various sensing devices is promising, the question of how to compare and combine the heterogeneous sensing results in a meaningful way is still open. To this end, this paper proposes a set of methodologies that are derived from several spectrum sensing experiments using heterogeneous sensing solutions. Each of the solutions offers different radio frequency front-end flexibility, sensing speed and accuracy and varies in the way the samples are processed and stored. The proposed methodologies cover four fundamental aspects in heterogeneous sensing: (i) storing experiment descriptions and heterogeneous results in a common data format; (ii) coping with different measurement resolutions ( in time or frequency domain); (iii) calibrating devices under strictly controlled conditions and (iv) processing techniques to efficiently analyse the obtained results. We believe that this paper provides an important first step towards a standardized and systematic approach of heterogeneous sensing solutions

Radio hardware virtualization for software-defined wireless networks

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a promising architecture for next generation Internet. SDN can achieve Network Function Virtualization much more efficiently than conventional architectures by splitting the data and control planes. Though SDN emerged first in wired network, its wireless counterpart Software-Defined Wireless Network (SDWN) also attracted an increasing amount of interest in the recent years. Wireless networks have some distinct characteristics compared to the wired networks due to the wireless channel dynamics. Therefore, network controllers present some extra degrees of freedom, such as taking measurements against interference and noise, or adapting channels according to the radio spectrum occupation. These specific characteristics bring about more challenges to wireless SDNs. Currently, SDWN implementations are mainly using customized firmware, such as OpenWRT, running on an embedded application processor in commercial WiFi chips, and restricted to layers above lower Media Access Control. This limitation comes from the fact that radio hardware usually require specific drivers, which have a proprietary implementation by various chipset vendors. Hence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve virtualization on the radio hardware. However, this status has been changing as Software-Defined Radio (SDR) systems open up the entire radio communication stack to radio hobbyists and researchers. The bridge between SDR and SDN will make it possible to bring the softwarization and virtualization of wireless networks down to the physical layer, which will unlock the full potential of SDWN. This paper investigates the necessity and feasibility of extending the virtualization of wireless networks towards the radio hardware. A SDR architecture is presented for radio hardware virtualization in order to facilitate SDWN design and experimentation. We do believe that by adopting the virtualization-oriented hardware accelerator design presented here, an all-layer end-to-end high performance SDWN can be achieved