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

Spectral and Energy Efficiency in Cognitive Radio Systems with Unslotted Primary Users and Sensing Uncertainty

This paper studies energy efficiency (EE) and average throughput maximization for cognitive radio systems in the presence of unslotted primary users. It is assumed that primary user activity follows an ON-OFF alternating renewal process. Secondary users first sense the channel possibly with errors in the form of miss detections and false alarms, and then start the data transmission only if no primary user activity is detected. The secondary user transmission is subject to constraints on collision duration ratio, which is defined as the ratio of average collision duration to transmission duration. In this setting, the optimal power control policy which maximizes the EE of the secondary users or maximizes the average throughput while satisfying a minimum required EE under average/peak transmit power and average interference power constraints are derived. Subsequently, low-complexity algorithms for jointly determining the optimal power level and frame duration are proposed. The impact of probabilities of detection and false alarm, transmit and interference power constraints on the EE, average throughput of the secondary users, optimal transmission power, and the collisions with primary user transmissions are evaluated. In addition, some important properties of the collision duration ratio are investigated. The tradeoff between the EE and average throughput under imperfect sensing decisions and different primary user traffic are further analyzed.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Energy-efficient spectrum sensing approaches for cognitive radio systems

Designing an energy efficient cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio network is our main research objective in this dissertation. Two different approaches are employed to achieve the goal, clustering and minimizing the number of participating cognitive radio users in the cooperative process. First, using clustering technique, a multilevel hierarchical cluster-based structure spectrum sensing algorithm has been proposed to tackle the balance between cooperation gain and cost by combining two different fusion rules and exploiting the tree structure of the cluster. The algorithm considerably minimizes the reporting overhead while satisfying the detection requirements. Second, based on reducing the number of participating cognitive radio users, primary user protection is considered to develop an energy efficient algorithm for cluster-based cooperative spectrum sensing system. An iterative algorithm with low complexity has been proposed to design energy efficient spectrum sensing for cluster-based cooperative systems. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly minimize the number of contributing of cognitive radio users in the collaboration process and can compromise the performance gain and the incurred overhead. Moreover, a variable sensing window size is also considered to propose three novel strategies for energy efficient centralized cooperative spectrum sensing system using the three hard decision fusion rules. The results show that strategies remarkably increase the energy efficiency of the cooperative system; furthermore, it is shown optimality of k out of N rule over other two hard decision fusion rules. Finally, joint optimization of transmission power and sensing time for a single cognitive radio is considered. An iterative algorithm with low computational requirements has been proposed to jointly optimize power and sensing time to maximize the energy efficiency metric. Computer results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms those existing works in the literature

An incentive-based dynamic energy efficient spectrum allocation for cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio is a successful technique for utilizing the unused and under-used spectrum, and dynamic spectrum access is one of the major facilitators in making this happen. When a secondary user (an unlicensed user) interferes with the licensed user, the idea of using unused or under-utilized spectrum offers a challenge. Therefore, effective spectrum sensing is necessary to ensure the primary user’s protection and the successful transmission of data by the secondary user. An Optimal Incentive algorithm is suggested to meet this need. It effectively uses the available idle channel based on the joint optimization of sensing time and transmission time without interfering with the primary user. The proposed work also contributes to a significant increase in energy efficiency with minimal interference. Simulation results show an increase in efficiency when compared with the algorithms, namely, exhaustive search and sub-optimal algorithms

Energy Aware Multipath Routing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) emerged as a paradigm to solve the problem of limited spectrum availability and the spectrum underutilization in wireless networks by opportunistically exploiting portions of the spectrum temporarily vacated by licensed primary users (PUs). Routing in CRNs is a challenging problem due to the PU activities and mobility. On the other hand, energy aware routing is very important in energy-constraint CRNs. In addition, it is crucial that CR users efficiently exchange data with each other before the appearance of PUs. To design a robust routing scheme for mobile CR ad hoc networks (CRANs), the constraints on residual energy of each CR user, reliability, and the protection of PUs must additionally be taken into account. Moreover, multipath routing has great potential for improving the end-to-end performance of ad hoc networks. Considering all these evidences, in this paper, we propose an energy aware on-demand multipath routing (EOMR) protocol for mobile CRANs to ensure the robustness and to improve the throughput. The proposed routing scheme involves energy efficient multipath route selection and spectrum allocation jointly. The simulation results show that our approach improves the overall performance of the network