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

Compressive Acquisition and Processing of Sparse Analog Signals

Since the advent of the first digital processing units, the importance of digital signal processing has been steadily rising. Today, most signal processing happens in the digital domain, requiring that analog signals be first sampled and digitized before any relevant data can be extracted from them. The recent explosion of the demands for data acquisition, storage and processing, however, has pushed the capabilities of conventional acquisition systems to their limits in many application areas. By offering an alternative view on the signal acquisition process, ideas from sparse signal processing and one of its main beneficiaries compressed sensing (CS), aim at alleviating some of these problems. In this thesis, we look into the ways the application of a compressive measurement kernel impacts the signal recovery performance and investigate methods to infer the current signal complexity from the compressive observations. We then study a particular application, namely that of sub-Nyquist sampling and processing of sparse analog multiband signals in spectral, angular and spatial domains.Seit dem Aufkommen der ersten digitalen Verarbeitungseinheiten hat die Bedeutung der digitalen Signalverarbeitung stetig zugenommen. Heutzutage findet die meiste Signalverarbeitung im digitalen Bereich statt, was erfordert, dass analoge Signale zuerst abgetastet und digitalisiert werden, bevor relevante Daten daraus extrahiert werden können. Jahrzehntelang hat die herkömmliche äquidistante Abtastung, die durch das Nyquist-Abtasttheorem bestimmt wird, zu diesem Zweck ein nahezu universelles Mittel bereitgestellt. Der kürzliche explosive Anstieg der Anforderungen an die Datenerfassung, -speicherung und -verarbeitung hat jedoch die Fähigkeiten herkömmlicher Erfassungssysteme in vielen Anwendungsbereichen an ihre Grenzen gebracht. Durch eine alternative Sichtweise auf den Signalerfassungsprozess können Ideen aus der sparse Signalverarbeitung und einer ihrer Hauptanwendungsgebiete, Compressed Sensing (CS), dazu beitragen, einige dieser Probleme zu mindern. Basierend auf der Annahme, dass der Informationsgehalt eines Signals oft viel geringer ist als was von der nativen Repräsentation vorgegeben, stellt CS ein alternatives Konzept für die Erfassung und Verarbeitung bereit, das versucht, die Abtastrate unter Beibehaltung des Signalinformationsgehalts zu reduzieren. In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir einige der Grundlagen des endlichdimensionalen CSFrameworks und seine Verbindung mit Sub-Nyquist Abtastung und Verarbeitung von sparsen analogen Signalen. Obwohl es seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt ein Schwerpunkt aktiver Forschung ist, gibt es noch erhebliche Lücken beim Verständnis der Auswirkungen von komprimierenden Ansätzen auf die Signalwiedergewinnung und die Verarbeitungsleistung, insbesondere bei rauschbehafteten Umgebungen und in Bezug auf praktische Messaufgaben. In dieser Dissertation untersuchen wir, wie sich die Anwendung eines komprimierenden Messkerns auf die Signal- und Rauschcharakteristiken auf die Signalrückgewinnungsleistung auswirkt. Wir erforschen auch Methoden, um die aktuelle Signal-Sparsity-Order aus den komprimierten Messungen abzuleiten, ohne auf die Nyquist-Raten-Verarbeitung zurückzugreifen, und zeigen den Vorteil, den sie für den Wiederherstellungsprozess bietet. Nachdem gehen wir zu einer speziellen Anwendung, nämlich der Sub-Nyquist-Abtastung und Verarbeitung von sparsen analogen Multibandsignalen. Innerhalb des Sub-Nyquist-Abtastung untersuchen wir drei verschiedene Multiband-Szenarien, die Multiband-Sensing in der spektralen, Winkel und räumlichen-Domäne einbeziehen.Since the advent of the first digital processing units, the importance of digital signal processing has been steadily rising. Today, most signal processing happens in the digital domain, requiring that analog signals be first sampled and digitized before any relevant data can be extracted from them. For decades, conventional uniform sampling that is governed by the Nyquist sampling theorem has provided an almost universal means to this end. The recent explosion of the demands for data acquisition, storage and processing, however, has pushed the capabilities of conventional acquisition systems to their limits in many application areas. By offering an alternative view on the signal acquisition process, ideas from sparse signal processing and one of its main beneficiaries compressed sensing (CS), have the potential to assist alleviating some of these problems. Building on the premise that the signal information rate is often much lower than what is dictated by its native representation, CS provides an alternative acquisition and processing framework that attempts to reduce the sampling rate while preserving the information content of the signal. In this thesis, we explore some of the basic foundations of the finite-dimensional CS framework and its connection to sub-Nyquist sampling and processing of sparse continuous analog signals with application to multiband sensing. Despite being a focus of active research for over a decade, there still remain signi_cant gaps in understanding the implications that compressive approaches have on the signal recovery and processing performance, especially against noisy settings and in relation to practical sampling problems. This dissertation aims at filling some of these gaps. More specifically, we look into the ways the application of a compressive measurement kernel impacts signal and noise characteristics and the relation it has to the signal recovery performance. We also investigate methods to infer the current complexity of the signal scene from the reduced-rate compressive observations without resorting to Nyquist-rate processing and show the advantage this knowledge offers to the recovery process. Having considered some of the universal aspects of compressive systems, we then move to studying a particular application, namely that of sub-Nyquist sampling and processing of sparse analog multiband signals. Within the sub-Nyquist sampling framework, we examine three different multiband scenarios that involve multiband sensing in spectral, angular and spatial domains. For each of them, we provide a sub-Nyquist receiver architecture, develop recovery methods and numerically evaluate their performance

On Random Sampling for Compliance Monitoring in Opportunistic Spectrum Access Networks

In the expanding spectrum marketplace, there has been a long term evolution towards more market€“oriented mechanisms, such as Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA), enabled through Cognitive Radio (CR) technology. However, the potential of CR technologies to revolutionize wireless communications, also introduces challenges based upon the potentially non€“deterministic CR behaviour in the Electrospace. While establishing and enforcing compliance to spectrum etiquette rules are essential to realization of successful OSA networks in the future, there has only been recent increased research activity into enforcement. This dissertation presents novel work on the spectrum monitoring aspect, which is crucial to effective enforcement of OSA. An overview of the challenges faced by current compliance monitoring methods is first presented. A framework is then proposed for the use of random spectral sampling techniques to reduce data collection complexity in wideband sensing scenarios. This approach is recommended as an alternative to Compressed Sensing (CS) techniques for wideband spectral occupancy estimation, which may be difficult to utilize in many practical congested scenarios where compliance monitoring is required. Next, a low€“cost computational approach to online randomized temporal sensing deployment is presented for characterization of temporal spectrum occupancy in cognitive radio scenarios. The random sensing approach is demonstrated and its performance is compared to CS€“based approach for occupancy estimation. A novel frame€“based sampling inversion technique is then presented for cases when it is necessary to track the temporal behaviour of individual CRs or CR networks. Parameters from randomly sampled Physical Layer Convergence Protocol (PLCP) data frames are used to reconstruct occupancy statistics, taking account of missed frames due to sampling design, sensor limitations and frame errors. Finally, investigations into the use of distributed and mobile spectrum sensing to collect spatial diversity to improve the above techniques are presented, for several common monitoring tasks in spectrum enforcement. Specifically, focus is upon techniques for achieving consensus in dynamic topologies such as in mobile sensing scenarios

Compressive Sensing and Recovery of Structured Sparse Signals

In the recent years, numerous disciplines including telecommunications, medical imaging, computational biology, and neuroscience benefited from increasing applications of high dimensional datasets. This calls for efficient ways of data capturing and data processing. Compressive sensing (CS), which is introduced as an efficient sampling (data capturing) method, is addressing this need. It is well-known that the signals, which belong to an ambient high-dimensional space, have much smaller dimensionality in an appropriate domain. CS taps into this principle and dramatically reduces the number of samples that is required to be captured to avoid any distortion in the information content of the data. This reduction in the required number of samples enables many new applications that were previously infeasible using classical sampling techniques. Most CS-based approaches take advantage of the inherent low-dimensionality in many datasets. They try to determine a sparse representation of the data, in an appropriately chosen basis using only a few significant elements. These approaches make no extra assumptions regarding possible relationships among the significant elements of that basis. In this dissertation, different ways of incorporating the knowledge about such relationships are integrated into the data sampling and the processing schemes. We first consider the recovery of temporally correlated sparse signals and show that using the time correlation model. The recovery performance can be significantly improved. Next, we modify the sampling process of sparse signals to incorporate the signal structure in a more efficient way. In the image processing application, we show that exploiting the structure information in both signal sampling and signal recovery improves the efficiency of the algorithm. In addition, we show that region-of-interest information can be included in the CS sampling and recovery steps to provide a much better quality for the region-of-interest area compared the rest of the image or video. In spectrum sensing applications, CS can dramatically improve the sensing efficiency by facilitating the coordination among spectrum sensors. A cluster-based spectrum sensing with coordination among spectrum sensors is proposed for geographically disperse cognitive radio networks. Further, CS has been exploited in this problem for simultaneous sensing and localization. Having access to this information dramatically facilitates the implementation of advanced communication technologies as required by 5G communication networks

Channel Estimation and ICI Cancelation in Vehicular Channels of OFDM Wireless Communication Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme increases bandwidth efficiency (BE) of data transmission and eliminates inter symbol interference (ISI). As a result, it has been widely used for wideband communication systems that have been developed during the past two decades and it can be a good candidate for the emerging communication systems such as fifth generation (5G) cellular networks with high carrier frequency and communication systems of high speed vehicles such as high speed trains (HSTs) and supersonic unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs). However, the employment of OFDM for those upcoming systems is challenging because of high Doppler shifts. High Doppler shift makes the wideband communication channel to be both frequency selective and time selective, doubly selective (DS), causes inter carrier interference (ICI) and destroys the orthogonality between the subcarriers of OFDM signal. In order to demodulate the signal in OFDM systems and mitigate ICIs, channel state information (CSI) is required. In this work, we deal with channel estimation (CE) and ICI cancellation in DS vehicular channels. The digitized model of the DS channels can be short and dense, or long and sparse. CE methods that perform well for short and dense channels are highly inefficient for long and sparse channels. As a result, for the latter type of channels, we proposed the employment of compressed sensing (CS) based schemes for estimating the channel. In addition, we extended our CE methods for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) scenarios. We evaluated the CE accuracy and data demodulation fidelity, along with the BE and computational complexity of our methods and compared the results with the previous CE procedures in different environments. The simulation results indicate that our proposed CE methods perform considerably better than the conventional CE schemes

Sparsity-Aware Low-Power ADC Architecture with Advanced Reconstruction Algorithms

Compressive sensing (CS) technique enables a universal sub-Nyquist sampling of sparse and compressible signals, while still guaranteeing the reliable signal recovery. Its potential lies in the reduced analog-to-digital conversion rate in sampling broadband and/or multi-channel sparse signals, where conventional Nyquist-rate sampling are either technology impossible or extremely hardware costly. Nevertheless, there are many challenges in the CS hardware design. In coherent sampling, state-of-the-art mixed-signal CS front-ends, such as random demodulator and modulated wideband converter, suffer from high power and nonlinear hardware. In signal recovery, state-of-the-art CS reconstruction methods have tractable computational complexity and probabilistically guaranteed performance. However, they are still high cost (basis pursuit) or noise sensitive (matching pursuit). In this dissertation, we propose an asynchronous compressive sensing (ACS) front-end and advanced signal reconstruction algorithms to address these challenges. The ACS front-end consists of a continuous-time ternary encoding (CT-TE) scheme which converts signal amplitude variations into high-rate ternary timing signal, and a digital random sampler (DRS) which captures the ternary timing signal at sub-Nyquist rate. The CT-TE employs asynchronous sampling mechanism for pulsed-like input and has signal-dependent conversion rate. The DRS has low power, ease of massive integration, and excellent linearity in comparison to state-of-the-art mixed-signal CS front-ends. We propose two reconstruction algorithms. One is group-based total variation, which exploits piecewise-constant characteristics and achieves better mean squared error and faster convergence rate than the conventional TV scheme with moderate noise. The second algorithm is split-projection least squares (SPLS), which relies on a series of low-complexity and independent l2-norm problems with the prior on ternary-valued signal. The SPLS scheme has good noise robustness, low-cost signal reconstruction and facilitates a parallel hardware for real-time signal recovery. In application study, we propose multi-channel filter banks ACS front-end for the interference-robust radar. The proposed receiver performs reliable target detection with nearly 8-fold data compression than Nyquist-rate sampling in the presence of -50dBm wireless interference. We also propose an asynchronous compressed beamformer (ACB) for low-power portable diagnostic ultrasound. The proposed ACB achieves 9-fold data volume compression and only 4.4% contrast-to-noise ratio loss on the imaging results when compared with the Nyquist-rate ADCs