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

Multiband OFDM for Cognitive Radio – A Way for Cyclostationary Detection and Interference Cancellation

With the tremendous growth in wireless technology there has been a shortage in the spectrum utilized for certain applications while some spectrum remains idle. To overcome this problem and for the efficient utilization of the spectrum cognitive radio is the suitable solution.Multiband OFDM can be easily modeled as cognitive radio, a technology that is employed for utilizing the available spectrum in the most efficient way. Since sensing of the free spectrum for detecting the arrival of the primary users is the foremost job of cognitive, here cyclostationary based spectrum sensing is carried out. Its performance is investigated using universal software defined radio peripheral (USRP) kit which is the hardware test bed for the cognitive radio system. Results are shown using Labview software. Further to mitigate the interference between the primary and cognitive users a modified intrusion elimination (AIC) algorithm had been proposed which in turn ensures the coexistence of both the users in the same wireless environment

Algorithmic Framework and Implementation of Spectrum Holes Detection for Cognitive Radios

The ability to dynamically discover portions of unused radio spectrum (spectrum holes) is an important ability of cognitive radio systems. Spectrum holes present a potential opportunity for wireless communication. Detection of holes and signals allows cognitive radios to dynamically access and share the spectrum with minimal interference. This work steps through the design, implementation, and analysis of a spectrum holes detector for cognitive radios. Energy detection and cyclostationary detection algorithms for detecting spectrum holes are compared through computer simulations. Ultimately an energy detection algorithm is proposed which performs better than the cyclostationary detection algorithm and requires no a-priori knowledge of noise power. The energy detection algorithm is implemented on the bladeRF x115 software-defined radio for wideband detection, leveraging on-board FPGA hardware and field-programmable analog hardware to scan a gigahertz-order range of frequencies and discover spectrum holes in real time. Resource utilization and requirements of the implementation are analyzed, and a utilization of 8.8% of the FPGA\u27s logic resources is reported. Experiments are performed on the implementation to measure its detection performance and demonstrate its ability to detect holes over a wide bandwidth with reasonable latency

Applications of nonuniform sampling in wideband multichannel communication systems

This research is an investigation into utilising randomised sampling in communication systems to ease the sampling rate requirements of digitally processing narrowband signals residing within a wide range of overseen frequencies. By harnessing the aliasing suppression capabilities of such sampling schemes, it is shown that certain processing tasks, namely spectrum sensing, can be performed at significantly low sampling rates compared to those demanded by uniform-sampling-based digital signal processing. The latter imposes sampling frequencies of at least twice the monitored bandwidth regardless of the spectral activity within. Aliasing can otherwise result in irresolvable processing problems, as the spectral support of the present signal is a priori unknown. Lower sampling rates exploit the processing module(s) resources (such as power) more efficiently and avoid the possible need for premium specialised high-cost DSP, especially if the handled bandwidth is considerably wide. A number of randomised sampling schemes are examined and appropriate spectral analysis tools are used to furnish their salient features. The adopted periodogram-type estimators are tailored to each of the schemes and their statistical characteristics are assessed for stationary, and cyclostationary signals. Their ability to alleviate the bandwidth limitation of uniform sampling is demonstrated and the smeared-aliasing defect that accompanies randomised sampling is also quantified. In employing the aforementioned analysis tools a novel wideband spectrum sensing approach is introduced. It permits the simultaneous sensing of a number of nonoverlapping spectral subbands constituting a wide range of monitored frequencies. The operational sampling rates of the sensing procedure are not limited or dictated by the overseen bandwidth antithetical to uniform-sampling-based techniques. Prescriptive guidelines are developed to ensure that the proposed technique satisfies certain detection probabilities predefined by the user. These recommendations address the trade-off between the required sampling rate and the length of the signal observation window (sensing time) in a given scenario. Various aspects of the introduced multiband spectrum sensing approach are investigated and its applicability highlighted

Non-uniform sampling and reconstruction of multi-band signals and its application in wideband spectrum sensing of cognitive radio

Sampling theories lie at the heart of signal processing devices and communication systems. To accommodate high operating rates while retaining low computational cost, efficient analog-to digital (ADC) converters must be developed. Many of limitations encountered in current converters are due to a traditional assumption that the sampling state needs to acquire the data at the Nyquist rate, corresponding to twice the signal bandwidth. In this thesis a method of sampling far below the Nyquist rate for sparse spectrum multiband signals is investigated. The method is called periodic non-uniform sampling, and it is useful in a variety of applications such as data converters, sensor array imaging and image compression. Firstly, a model for the sampling system in the frequency domain is prepared. It relates the Fourier transform of observed compressed samples with the unknown spectrum of the signal. Next, the reconstruction process based on the topic of compressed sensing is provided. We show that the sampling parameters play an important role on the average sample ratio and the quality of the reconstructed signal. The concept of condition number and its effect on the reconstructed signal in the presence of noise is introduced, and a feasible approach for choosing a sample pattern with a low condition number is given. We distinguish between the cases of known spectrum and unknown spectrum signals respectively. One of the model parameters is determined by the signal band locations that in case of unknown spectrum signals should be estimated from sampled data. Therefore, we applied both subspace methods and non-linear least square methods for estimation of this parameter. We also used the information theoretic criteria (Akaike and MDL) and the exponential fitting test techniques for model order selection in this case

Fast Initialization of Cognitive Radio Systems

International audienceFast initialization of cognitive radio systems is a key problem in a variety of wireless communication systems, particularly for public safety organizations in emergency crises. In the initialization problem, the goal is to rapidly identify an unoccupied frequency band. In this paper, we formalize the initialization problem within the framework of active hypothesis testing. We characterize the optimal scanning policy in the case of at most one free band and show that the policy is computationally challenging. Motivated by this challenge for the implementation of the optimal policy and the need to cope with an unknown number of interferers larger than one, we propose the constrained DGF algorithm. We show that for strict constraints on the maximum number of observations, the constrained DGF algorithm can outperform the error probability of the state-of-the-art C-SPRT algorithm by an order of magnitude, for comparable average delays