Distributed Nonparametric Sequential Spectrum Sensing under Electromagnetic Interference

A nonparametric distributed sequential algorithm for quick detection of spectral holes in a Cognitive Radio set up is proposed. Two or more local nodes make decisions and inform the fusion centre (FC) over a reporting Multiple Access Channel (MAC), which then makes the final decision. The local nodes use energy detection and the FC uses mean detection in the presence of fading, heavy-tailed electromagnetic interference (EMI) and outliers. The statistics of the primary signal, channel gain or the EMI is not known. Different nonparametric sequential algorithms are compared to choose appropriate algorithms to be used at the local nodes and the FC. Modification of a recently developed random walk test is selected for the local nodes for energy detection as well as at the fusion centre for mean detection. It is shown via simulations and analysis that the nonparametric distributed algorithm developed performs well in the presence of fading, EMI and is robust to outliers. The algorithm is iterative in nature making the computation and storage requirements minimal.Comment: 8 pages; 6 figures; Version 2 has the proofs for the theorems. Version 3 contains a new section on approximation analysi

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

SNR-Walls in Eigenvalue-based Spectrum Sensing

Various spectrum sensing approaches have been shown to suffer from a so-called SNR-wall, an SNR value below which a detector cannot perform robustly no matter how many observations are used. Up to now, the eigenvalue-based maximum-minimum-eigenvalue (MME) detector has been a notable exception. For instance, the model uncertainty of imperfect knowledge of the receiver noise power, which is known to be responsible for the energy detector's fundamental limits, does not adversely affect the MME detector's performance. While additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is a standard assumption in wireless communications, it is not a reasonable one for the MME detector. In fact, in this work we prove that uncertainty in the amount of noise coloring does lead to an SNR-wall for the MME detector. We derive a lower bound on this SNR-wall and evaluate it for example scenarios. The findings are supported by numerical simulations.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, submitted to EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networkin

Collaborative Spectrum Sensing from Sparse Observations in Cognitive Radio Networks

Spectrum sensing, which aims at detecting spectrum holes, is the precondition for the implementation of cognitive radio (CR). Collaborative spectrum sensing among the cognitive radio nodes is expected to improve the ability of checking complete spectrum usage. Due to hardware limitations, each cognitive radio node can only sense a relatively narrow band of radio spectrum. Consequently, the available channel sensing information is far from being sufficient for precisely recognizing the wide range of unoccupied channels. Aiming at breaking this bottleneck, we propose to apply matrix completion and joint sparsity recovery to reduce sensing and transmitting requirements and improve sensing results. Specifically, equipped with a frequency selective filter, each cognitive radio node senses linear combinations of multiple channel information and reports them to the fusion center, where occupied channels are then decoded from the reports by using novel matrix completion and joint sparsity recovery algorithms. As a result, the number of reports sent from the CRs to the fusion center is significantly reduced. We propose two decoding approaches, one based on matrix completion and the other based on joint sparsity recovery, both of which allow exact recovery from incomplete reports. The numerical results validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approaches. In particular, in small-scale networks, the matrix completion approach achieves exact channel detection with a number of samples no more than 50% of the number of channels in the network, while joint sparsity recovery achieves similar performance in large-scale networks.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure