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

Sub-Nyquist Sampling: Bridging Theory and Practice

Sampling theory encompasses all aspects related to the conversion of continuous-time signals to discrete streams of numbers. The famous Shannon-Nyquist theorem has become a landmark in the development of digital signal processing. In modern applications, an increasingly number of functions is being pushed forward to sophisticated software algorithms, leaving only those delicate finely-tuned tasks for the circuit level. In this paper, we review sampling strategies which target reduction of the ADC rate below Nyquist. Our survey covers classic works from the early 50's of the previous century through recent publications from the past several years. The prime focus is bridging theory and practice, that is to pinpoint the potential of sub-Nyquist strategies to emerge from the math to the hardware. In that spirit, we integrate contemporary theoretical viewpoints, which study signal modeling in a union of subspaces, together with a taste of practical aspects, namely how the avant-garde modalities boil down to concrete signal processing systems. Our hope is that this presentation style will attract the interest of both researchers and engineers in the hope of promoting the sub-Nyquist premise into practical applications, and encouraging further research into this exciting new frontier.Comment: 48 pages, 18 figures, to appear in IEEE Signal Processing Magazin

Compressive and Noncompressive Power Spectral Density Estimation from Periodic Nonuniform Samples

This paper presents a novel power spectral density estimation technique for band-limited, wide-sense stationary signals from sub-Nyquist sampled data. The technique employs multi-coset sampling and incorporates the advantages of compressed sensing (CS) when the power spectrum is sparse, but applies to sparse and nonsparse power spectra alike. The estimates are consistent piecewise constant approximations whose resolutions (width of the piecewise constant segments) are controlled by the periodicity of the multi-coset sampling. We show that compressive estimates exhibit better tradeoffs among the estimator's resolution, system complexity, and average sampling rate compared to their noncompressive counterparts. For suitable sampling patterns, noncompressive estimates are obtained as least squares solutions. Because of the non-negativity of power spectra, compressive estimates can be computed by seeking non-negative least squares solutions (provided appropriate sampling patterns exist) instead of using standard CS recovery algorithms. This flexibility suggests a reduction in computational overhead for systems estimating both sparse and nonsparse power spectra because one algorithm can be used to compute both compressive and noncompressive estimates.Comment: 26 pages, single spaced, 9 figure

Regularized sampling of multiband signals

This paper presents a regularized sampling method for multiband signals, that makes it possible to approach the Landau limit, while keeping the sensitivity to noise at a low level. The method is based on band-limited windowing, followed by trigonometric approximation in consecutive time intervals. The key point is that the trigonometric approximation "inherits" the multiband property, that is, its coefficients are formed by bursts of non-zero elements corresponding to the multiband components. It is shown that this method can be well combined with the recently proposed synchronous multi-rate sampling (SMRS) scheme, given that the resulting linear system is sparse and formed by ones and zeroes. The proposed method allows one to trade sampling efficiency for noise sensitivity, and is specially well suited for bounded signals with unbounded energy like those in communications, navigation, audio systems, etc. Besides, it is also applicable to finite energy signals and periodic band-limited signals (trigonometric polynomials). The paper includes a subspace method for blindly estimating the support of the multiband signal as well as its components, and the results are validated through several numerical examples.Comment: The title and introduction have changed. Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

A review of RFI mitigation techniques in microwave radiometry

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a well-known problem in microwave radiometry (MWR). Any undesired signal overlapping the MWR protected frequency bands introduces a bias in the measurements, which can corrupt the retrieved geophysical parameters. This paper presents a literature review of RFI detection and mitigation techniques for microwave radiometry from space. The reviewed techniques are divided between real aperture and aperture synthesis. A discussion and assessment of the application of RFI mitigation techniques is presented for each type of radiometer.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Extracting cosmic microwave background polarisation from satellite astrophysical maps

We present the application of the Fast Independent Component Analysis ({\ica}) technique for blind component separation to polarized astrophysical emission. We study how the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarized signal, consisting of $E$ and $B$ modes, can be extracted from maps affected by substantial contamination from diffuse Galactic foreground emission and instrumental noise. {We implement Monte Carlo chains varying the CMB and noise realizations in order to asses the average capabilities of the algorithm and their variance.} We perform the analysis of all sky maps simulated according to the {\sc Planck} satellite capabilities, modelling the sky signal as a superposition of the CMB and of the existing simulated polarization templates of Galactic synchrotron. Our results indicate that the angular power spectrum of CMB $E$-mode can be recovered on all scales up to $\ell\simeq 1000$, corresponding to the fourth acoustic oscillation, while the $B$-mode power spectrum can be detected, up to its turnover at $\ell\simeq 100$, if the ratio of tensor to scalar contributions to the temperature quadrupole exceeds 30%. The power spectrum of the cross correlation between total intensity and polarization, $TE$, can be recovered up to $\ell\simeq 1200$, corresponding to the seventh $TE$ acoustic oscillation.Comment: 20 pages, MNRAS in pres