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

A Reconfigurable Platform For Cognitive Radio

Today¿s rigid spectrum allocation scheme creates a spectrum scarcity problem for future wireless communications. Measurements show that a wide range of the allocated frequency bands are rarely used. Cognitive radio is a novel approach to improve the spectrum usage, which is able to sense the spectrum and adapt its transmission while coexisting with the licensed spectrum user. A reconfigurable radio platform is required to provide enough adaptivity for cognitive radio. In this paper, we propose a cognitive radio system architecture and discuss its possible implementation on a heterogeneous reconfigurable radio platform

Improved Energy Detector for Wideband Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, an improved energy detector for a wideband spectrum sensing is proposed. For a better detection of the spectrum holes the overall band is divided into equal non-overlapping sub-bands. The main objective is to determine the detection thresholds for each of these subbands jointly. By defining the problem as an optimization problem, we aim to find the maximum aggregated opportunistic throughput of cognitive radio networks. Introducing practical constraints to this optimization problem will change the problem into a convex and solvable one. The results of this paper show that the proposed improved energy detector will increase the aggregated throughput considerably

Spectrum Sensing Techniqes in Cognitive Radio: Cyclostationary Method

Cognitive Radios promise to be a major shift in wireless communications based on developing a novel approach which attempt to reduce spectrum scarcity that growing up in the past and waited to increase in the future. Since formulating stages for increasing interest in wireless application proves to be extremely challenging, it is growing rapidly. Initially this growth leads to huge demand for the radio spectrum. The novelty of this approach needs to optimize the spectrum utilization and find the efficient way for sharing the radio frequencies through spectrum sensing process. Spectrum sensing is one of the most significant tasks that allow cognitive radio functionality to implement and one of the most challenging tasks. A main challenge in sensing process arises from the fact that, detecting signals with a very low SNR in back ground of noise or severely masked by interference in specific time based on high reliability. This thesis describes the fundamental cognitive radio system aspect based on design and implementation by connecting between the theoretical and practical issue. Efficient method for sensing and detecting are studied and discussed through two fast methods of computing the spectral correlation density function, the FFT Accumulation Method and the Strip Spectral Correlation Algorithm. Several simulations have been performed to show the ability and performance of studied algorithms.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Primary User Emulation Detection in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radios (CRs) have been proposed as a promising solution for improving spectrum utilization via opportunistic spectrum sharing. In a CR network environment, primary (licensed) users have priority over secondary (unlicensed) users when accessing the wireless channel. Thus, if a malicious secondary user exploits this spectrum access etiquette by mimicking the spectral characteristics of a primary user, it can gain priority access to a wireless channel over other secondary users. This scenario is referred to in the literature as primary user emulation (PUE). This dissertation first covers three approaches for detecting primary user emulation attacks in cognitive radio networks, which can be classified in two categories. The first category is based on cyclostationary features, which employs a cyclostationary calculation to represent the modulation features of the user signals. The calculation results are then fed into an artificial neural network for classification. The second category is based on video processing method of action recognition in frequency domain, which includes two approaches. Both of them analyze the FFT sequences of wireless transmissions operating across a cognitive radio network environment, as well as classify their actions in the frequency domain. The first approach employs a covariance descriptor of motion-related features in the frequency domain, which is then fed into an artificial neural network for classification. The second approach is built upon the first approach, but employs a relational database system to record the motion-related feature vectors of primary users on this frequency band. When a certain transmission does not have a match record in the database, a covariance descriptor will be calculated and fed into an artificial neural network for classification. This dissertation is completed by a novel PUE detection approach which employs a distributed sensor network, where each sensor node works as an independent PUE detector. The emphasis of this work is how these nodes collaborate to obtain the final detection results for the whole network. All these proposed approaches have been validated via computer simulations as well as by experimental hardware implementations using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) software-defined radio (SDR) platform

CYCLOSTATIONARY FEATURES BASED LOW COMPLEXITY MUTLIRESOLUTION SPECTRUM SENSING FOR COGNITVE RADIO APPLICATIONS

The demand for variety of services using wireless communication has grown remarkably in the past few many years, consequently causing an acute problem of spectrum scarcity. Today, it is one of the most challenging problems in modern wireless communication. To overcome this, the concept of cognitive radio has been proposed and this technology is fast maturing. The first and foremost function a cognitive radio must do is to sense the spectrum as accurately as possible and do it with least complexity. Among many techniques of spectrum sensing, the Multi-resolution Spectrum Sensing (MRSS) is a popular technique in recent literature. Various multi resolution techniques are used that include wavelet based spectrum estimation and spectral hole detection, wavelet based multi-resolution in analog domain and multi-resolution multiple antenna based detection. However, the basic idea is the same - the total bandwidth is sensed using coarse resolution energy detection, then, fine sensing is applied to the portion of interest. None of these techniques, however, use multi-resolution sensing using cyclostationary features for cognitive radio applications which are more reliable but computationally expensive. In this thesis, we suggest a cyclostationary features based low complexity multi-resolution spectrum sensing for cognitive radio applications. The proposed technique discussed in this thesis is inspired by the quickness of multi-resolution and the reliability of cyclostationary feature detection. The performance of the proposed scheme is primarily evaluated by its complexity analysis and by determining the minimum signal-to-noise ratio that gives 90% probability of correct classification. Both subjective and objective evaluation show that the proposed scheme is not only superior to the commonly used energy detection method but also to various multi-resolution sensing techniques as it relies on the robustness of cyclostationary feature detection. The results found are encouraging and the proposed algorithms are proved to be not only fast but also more robust and reliable

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

Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio:use of cyclo-stationary detector

Cognitive radio allows unlicensed users to access licensed frequency bands through dynamic spectrum access so as to reduce spectrum scarcity. This requires intelligent spectrum sensing techniques like co-operative sensing which makes use of information from number of users. This thesis investigates the use of cyclo-stationary detector and its simulation in MATLAB for licensed user detection. Cyclo-stationary detector enables operation under low SNR conditions and thus saves the need for consulting more number of users. Simulation results show that implementing co-operative spectrum sensing help in better performance in terms of detection. The cyclo-stationary detector is used for performance evaluation for Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial (DVB-T) signals. Generally, DVB-T is specified in IEEE 802.22 standard (first standard based on cognitive radio) in VHF and UHF TV broadcasting spectrum. The thesis is further extended to find the number of optimal users in a scenario to optimize the detection probability and reduce overhead leading to better utilization of resources. The gradient descent algorithm and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique are put to use to find an optimum value of threshold. The performance for both these schemes is evaluated to find out which fares better