Analog to Digital Cognitive Radio: Sampling, Detection and Hardware

The proliferation of wireless communications has recently created a bottleneck in terms of spectrum availability. Motivated by the observation that the root of the spectrum scarcity is not a lack of resources but an inefficient managing that can be solved, dynamic opportunistic exploitation of spectral bands has been considered, under the name of Cognitive Radio (CR). This technology allows secondary users to access currently idle spectral bands by detecting and tracking the spectrum occupancy. The CR application revisits this traditional task with specific and severe requirements in terms of spectrum sensing and detection performance, real-time processing, robustness to noise and more. Unfortunately, conventional methods do not satisfy these demands for typical signals, that often have very high Nyquist rates. Recently, several sampling methods have been proposed that exploit signals' a priori known structure to sample them below the Nyquist rate. Here, we review some of these techniques and tie them to the task of spectrum sensing in the context of CR. We then show how issues related to spectrum sensing can be tackled in the sub-Nyquist regime. First, to cope with low signal to noise ratios, we propose to recover second-order statistics from the low rate samples, rather than the signal itself. In particular, we consider cyclostationary based detection, and investigate CR networks that perform collaborative spectrum sensing to overcome channel effects. To enhance the efficiency of the available spectral bands detection, we present joint spectrum sensing and direction of arrival estimation methods. Throughout this work, we highlight the relation between theoretical algorithms and their practical implementation. We show hardware simulations performed on a prototype we built, demonstrating the feasibility of sub-Nyquist spectrum sensing in the context of CR.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Magazin

Application of Compressive Sensing Techniques in Distributed Sensor Networks: A Survey

In this survey paper, our goal is to discuss recent advances of compressive sensing (CS) based solutions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) including the main ongoing/recent research efforts, challenges and research trends in this area. In WSNs, CS based techniques are well motivated by not only the sparsity prior observed in different forms but also by the requirement of efficient in-network processing in terms of transmit power and communication bandwidth even with nonsparse signals. In order to apply CS in a variety of WSN applications efficiently, there are several factors to be considered beyond the standard CS framework. We start the discussion with a brief introduction to the theory of CS and then describe the motivational factors behind the potential use of CS in WSN applications. Then, we identify three main areas along which the standard CS framework is extended so that CS can be efficiently applied to solve a variety of problems specific to WSNs. In particular, we emphasize on the significance of extending the CS framework to (i). take communication constraints into account while designing projection matrices and reconstruction algorithms for signal reconstruction in centralized as well in decentralized settings, (ii) solve a variety of inference problems such as detection, classification and parameter estimation, with compressed data without signal reconstruction and (iii) take practical communication aspects such as measurement quantization, physical layer secrecy constraints, and imperfect channel conditions into account. Finally, open research issues and challenges are discussed in order to provide perspectives for future research directions