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

Cooperative Radar and Communications Signaling: The Estimation and Information Theory Odd Couple

We investigate cooperative radar and communications signaling. While each system typically considers the other system a source of interference, by considering the radar and communications operations to be a single joint system, the performance of both systems can, under certain conditions, be improved by the existence of the other. As an initial demonstration, we focus on the radar as relay scenario and present an approach denoted multiuser detection radar (MUDR). A novel joint estimation and information theoretic bound formulation is constructed for a receiver that observes communications and radar return in the same frequency allocation. The joint performance bound is presented in terms of the communication rate and the estimation rate of the system.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, to be presented at 2014 IEEE Radar Conferenc

On the Statistics of Cognitive Radio Capacity in Shadowing and Fast Fading Environments (Journal Version)

In this paper we consider the capacity of the cognitive radio channel in different fading environments under a low interference regime. First we derive the probability that the low interference regime holds under shadow fading as well as Rayleigh and Rician fast fading conditions. We demonstrate that this is the dominant case, especially in practical cognitive radio deployment scenarios. The capacity of the cognitive radio channel depends critically on a power loss parameter, $\alpha$, which governs how much transmit power the cognitive radio dedicates to relaying the primary message. We derive a simple, accurate approximation to $\alpha$ in Rayleigh and Rician fading environments which gives considerable insight into system capacity. We also investigate the effects of system parameters and propagation environment on $\alpha$ and the cognitive radio capacity. In all cases, the use of the approximation is shown to be extremely accurate.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Commun. The conference version of this paper appears in Proc. IEEE CrownCom, 200