Spectrum sensing by cognitive radios at very low SNR

Spectrum sensing is one of the enabling functionalities for cognitive radio (CR) systems to operate in the spectrum white space. To protect the primary incumbent users from interference, the CR is required to detect incumbent signals at very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we present a spectrum sensing technique based on correlating spectra for detection of television (TV) broadcasting signals. The basic strategy is to correlate the periodogram of the received signal with the a priori known spectral features of the primary signal. We show that according to the Neyman-Pearson criterion, this spectral correlation-based sensing technique is asymptotically optimal at very low SNR and with a large sensing time. From the system design perspective, we analyze the effect of the spectral features on the spectrum sensing performance. Through the optimization analysis, we obtain useful insights on how to choose effective spectral features to achieve reliable sensing. Simulation results show that the proposed sensing technique can reliably detect analog and digital TV signals at SNR as low as -20 dB.Comment: IEEE Global Communications Conference 200

Cooperative Access in Cognitive Radio Networks: Stable Throughput and Delay Tradeoffs

In this paper, we study and analyze fundamental throughput-delay tradeoffs in cooperative multiple access for cognitive radio systems. We focus on the class of randomized cooperative policies, whereby the secondary user (SU) serves either the queue of its own data or the queue of the primary user (PU) relayed data with certain service probabilities. The proposed policy opens room for trading the PU delay for enhanced SU delay. Towards this objective, stability conditions for the queues involved in the system are derived. Furthermore, a moment generating function approach is employed to derive closed-form expressions for the average delay encountered by the packets of both users. Results reveal that cooperation expands the stable throughput region of the system and significantly reduces the delay at both users. Moreover, we quantify the gain obtained in terms of the SU delay under the proposed policy, over conventional relaying that gives strict priority to the relay queue.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE 12th Intl. Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt), 201