Ultra Low-Complexity Detection of Spectrum Holes in Compressed Wideband Spectrum Sensing

Wideband spectrum sensing is a significant challenge in cognitive radios (CRs) due to requiring very high-speed analog- to-digital converters (ADCs), operating at or above the Nyquist rate. Here, we propose a very low-complexity zero-block detection scheme that can detect a large fraction of spectrum holes from the sub-Nyquist samples, even when the undersampling ratio is very small. The scheme is based on a block sparse sensing matrix, which is implemented through the design of a novel analog-to- information converter (AIC). The proposed scheme identifies some measurements as being zero and then verifies the sub-channels associated with them as being vacant. Analytical and simulation results are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reliable detection of spectrum holes with complexity much lower than existing schemes. This work also introduces a new paradigm in compressed sensing where one is interested in reliable detection of (some of the) zero blocks rather than the recovery of the whole block sparse signal.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Compressive Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive IoT

PhDWith the rising of new paradigms in wireless communications such as Internet of things (IoT), current static frequency allocation policy faces a primary challenge of spectrum scarcity, and thus encourages the IoT devices to have cognitive capabilities to access the underutilised spectrum in the temporal and spatial dimensions. Wideband spectrum sensing is one of the key functions to enable dynamic spectrum access, but entails a major implementation challenge in terms of sampling rate and computation cost since the sampling rate of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) should be higher than twice of the spectrum bandwidth based on the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. By exploiting the sparse nature of wideband spectrum, sub-Nyquist sampling and sparse signal recovery have shown potential capabilities in handling these problems, which are directly related to compressive sensing (CS) from the viewpoint of its origin. To invoke sub-Nyquist wideband spectrum sensing in IoT, blind signal acquisition with low-complexity sparse recovery is desirable on compact IoT devices. Moreover, with cooperation among distributed IoT devices, the complexity of sampling and reconstruc- tion can be further reduced with performance guarantee. Specifically, an adaptively- regularized iterative reweighted least squares (AR-IRLS) reconstruction algorithm is proposed to speed up the convergence of reconstruction with less number of iterations. Furthermore, a low-complexity compressive spectrum sensing algorithm is proposed to reduce computation complexity in each iteration of IRLS-based reconstruction algorithm, from cubic time to linear time. Besides, to transfer computation burden from the IoT devices to the core network, a joint iterative reweighted sparse recovery scheme with geo-location database is proposed to adopt the occupied channel information from geo- location database to reduce the complexity in the signal reconstruction. Since numerous IoT devices access or release the spectrum randomly, the sparsity levels of wideband spec-trum signals are varying and unknown. A blind CS-based sensing algorithm is proposed to enable the local secondary users (SUs) to adaptively adjust the sensing time or sam- pling rate without knowledge of spectral sparsity. Apart from the signal reconstruction at the back-end, a distributed sub-Nyquist sensing scheme is proposed by utilizing the surrounding IoT devices to jointly sample the spectrum based on the multi-coset sam- pling theory, in which only the minimum number of low-rate ADCs on the IoT devices are required to form coset samplers without the prior knowledge of the number of occu- pied channels and signal-to-noise ratios. The models of the proposed algorithms are derived and verified by numerical analyses and tested on both real-world and simulated TV white space signals

Sub-Nyquist Wideband Spectrum Sensing and Sharing

PhDThe rising popularity of wireless services resulting in spectrum shortage has motivated dynamic spectrum sharing to facilitate e cient usage of the underutilized spectrum. Wideband spectrum sensing is a critical functionality to enable dynamic spectrum access by enhancing the opportunities of exploring spectral holes, but entails a major implemen- tation challenge in compact commodity radios that have limited energy and computation capabilities. The sampling rates speci ed by the Shannon-Nyquist theorem impose great challenges both on the acquisition hardware and the subsequent storage and digital sig- nal processors. Sub-Nyquist sampling was thus motivated to sample wideband signals at rates far lower than the Nyquist rate, while still retaining the essential information in the underlying signals. This thesis proposes several algorithms for invoking sub-Nyquist sampling in wideband spectrum sensing. Speci cally, a sub-Nyquist wideband spectrum sensing algorithm is proposed that achieves wideband sensing independent of signal sparsity without sampling at full bandwidth by using the low-speed analog-to-digital converters based on sparse Fast Fourier Transform. To lower signal spectrum sparsity while maintaining the channel state information, the received signal is pre-processed through a proposed permutation and ltering algorithm. Additionally, a low-complexity sub-Nyquist wideband spectrum sensing scheme is proposed that locates occupied channels blindly by recovering the sig- nal support, based on the jointly sparse nature of multiband signals. Exploiting the common signal support shared among multiple secondary users, an e cient coopera- tive spectrum sensing scheme is developed, in which the energy consumption on signal acquisition, processing, and transmission is reduced with the detection performance guar- antee. To further reduce the computation complexity of wideband spectrum sensing, a hybrid framework of sub-Nyquist wideband spectrum sensing with geolocation database is explored. Prior channel information from geolocation database is utilized in the sens- ing process to reduce the processing requirements on the sensor nodes. The models of the proposed algorithms are derived and veri ed by numerical analyses and tested on both real-world and simulated TV white space signals

Scaling network-based spectrum analyzer with constant communication cost

e propose a spectrum analyzer that leverages many networked commodity sensor nodes, each of which sam- ples its portion in a wideband spectrum. The sensors operate in parallel and transmit their measurements over a wireless network without performing any significant computations such as FFT. The measurements are forwarded to the backend of the system where spectrum analysis takes place. In particular, we propose a solution that compresses the raw measurements in a simple random linear projection and combines the compressed measurements from multiple sensors in-network. As a result, we achieve a substantial reduction in the network bandwidth requirement to operate the proposed system. We discover that the overall communication cost can be independent of the number of sensors and is affected only by sparsity of discretized spectrum under analysis. This principle founds the basis for a claim that our network-based spectrum analyzer can scale up the number of sensor nodes to process a very wide spectrum block potentially having a GHz bandwidth. We devise a novel recovery algorithm that systematically undoes compressive encoding and in-network combining done to the raw measurements, incorporating the least squares and l1-minimization decoding used in compressive sensing, and demonstrate that the algorithm can effectively restore an accurate estimate of the original data suitable for fine- rained spectrum analysis. We present mathematical analysis and empirical evaluation of the system with software-defined radios.Engineering and Applied Science

Compressive Sensing Over TV White Space in Wideband Cognitive Radio

PhDSpectrum scarcity is an important challenge faced by high-speed wireless communications. Meanwhile, caused by current spectrum assignment policy, a large portion of spectrum is underutilized. Motivated by this, cognitive radio (CR) has emerged as one of the most promising candidate solutions to improve spectrum utilization, by allowing secondary users (SUs) to opportunistically access the temporarily unused spectrum, without introducing harmful interference to primary users. Moreover, opening of TV white space (TVWS) gives us the con dence to enable CR for TVWS spectrum. A crucial requirement in CR networks (CRNs) is wideband spectrum sensing, in which SUs should detect spectral opportunities across a wide frequency range. However, wideband spectrum sensing could lead to una ordably high sampling rates at energy-constrained SUs. Compressive sensing (CS) was developed to overcome this issue, which enables sub-Nyquist sampling by exploiting sparse property. As the spectrum utilization is low, spectral signals exhibit a natural sparsity in frequency domain, which motivates the promising application of CS in wideband CRNs. This thesis proposes several e ective algorithms for invoking CS in wideband CRNs. Speci cally, a robust compressive spectrum sensing algorithm is proposed for reducing computational complexity of signal recovery. Additionally, a low-complexity algorithm is designed, in which original signals are recovered with fewer measurements, as geolocation database is invoked to provide prior information. Moreover, security enhancement issue of CRNs is addressed by proposing a malicious user detection algorithm, in which data corrupted by malicious users are removed during the process of matrix completion (MC). One key spotlight feature of this thesis is that both real-world signals and simulated signals over TVWS are invoked for evaluating network performance. Besides invoking CS and MC to reduce energy consumption, each SU is supposed to harvest energy from radio frequency. The proposed algorithm is capable of o ering higher throughput by performing signal recovery at a remote fusion center

Noncontact Vital Signs Detection

Human health condition can be accessed by measurement of vital signs, i.e., respiratory rate (RR), heart rate (HR), blood oxygen level, temperature and blood pressure. Due to drawbacks of contact sensors in measurement, non-contact sensors such as imaging photoplethysmogram (IPPG) and Doppler radar system have been proposed for cardiorespiratory rates detection by researchers.The UWB pulse Doppler radars provide high resolution range-time-frequency information. It is bestowed with advantages of low transmitted power, through-wall capabilities, and high resolution in localization. However, the poor signal to noise ratio (SNR) makes it challenging for UWB radar systems to accurately detect the heartbeat of a subject. To solve the problem, phased-methods have been proposed to extract the phase variations in the reflected pulses modulated by human tiny thorax motions. Advance signal processing method, i.e., state space method, can not only be used to enhance SNR of human vital signs detection, but also enable the micro-Doppler trajectories extraction of walking subject from UWB radar data.Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW) radar is an alternative technique useful to remotely monitor human subject activities. Compared with UWB pulse radar, it relieves the stress on requirement of high sampling rate analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and possesses higher signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in vital signs detection. However, conventional SFCW radar suffers from long data acquisition time to step over many frequencies. To solve this problem, multi-channel SFCW radar has been proposed to step through different frequency bandwidths simultaneously. Compressed sensing (CS) can further reduce the data acquisition time by randomly stepping through 20% of the original frequency steps.In this work, SFCW system is implemented with low cost, off-the-shelf surface mount components to make the radar sensors portable. Experimental results collected from both pulse and SFCW radar systems have been validated with commercial contact sensors and satisfactory results are shown

Collaborative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

The radio frequency (RF) spectrum is a scarce natural resource, currently regulated by government agencies. With the explosive emergence of wireless applications, the demands for the RF spectrum are constantly increasing. On the other hand, it has been reported that localised temporal and geographic spectrum utilisation efficiency is extremely low. Cognitive radio is an innovative technology designed to improve spectrum utilisation by exploiting those spectrum opportunities. This ability is dependent upon spectrum sensing, which is one of most critical components in a cognitive radio system. A significant challenge is to sense the whole RF spectrum at a particular physical location in a short observation time. Otherwise, performance degrades with longer observation times since the lagging response to spectrum holes implies low spectrum utilisation efficiency. Hence, developing an efficient wideband spectrum sensing technique is prime important. In this thesis, a multirate asynchronous sub-Nyquist sampling (MASS) system that employs multiple low-rate analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is developed that implements wideband spectrum sensing. The key features of the MASS system are, 1) low implementation complexity, 2) energy-efficiency for sharing spectrum sensing data, and 3) robustness against the lack of time synchronisation. The conditions under which recovery of the full spectrum is unique are presented using compressive sensing (CS) analysis. The MASS system is applied to both centralised and distributed cognitive radio networks. When the spectra of the cognitive radio nodes have a common spectral support, using one low-rate ADC in each cognitive radio node can successfully recover the full spectrum. This is obtained by applying a hybrid matching pursuit (HMP) algorithm - a synthesis of distributed compressive sensing simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit (DCS-SOMP) and compressive sampling matching pursuit (CoSaMP). Moreover, a multirate spectrum detection (MSD) system is introduced to detect the primary users from a small number of measurements without ever reconstructing the full spectrum. To achieve a better detection performance, a data fusion strategy is developed for combining sensing data from all cognitive radio nodes. Theoretical bounds on detection performance are derived for distributed cognitive radio nodes suffering from additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), Rayleigh fading, and log-normal fading channels. In conclusion, MASS and MSD both have a low implementation complexity, high energy efficiency, good data compression capability, and are applicable to distributed cognitive radio networks