Sensing Throughput Tradeoff for Cognitive Radio Networks with Noise Variance Uncertainty

This paper proposes novel spectrum sensing algorithm, and examines the sensing throughput tradeoff for cognitive radio (CR) networks under noise variance uncertainty. It is assumed that there are one white sub-band, and one target sub-band which is either white or non-white. Under this assumption, first we propose a novel generalized energy detector (GED) for examining the target sub-band by exploiting the noise information of the white sub-band, then, we study the tradeoff between the sensing time and achievable throughput of the CR network. To study this tradeoff, we consider the sensing time optimization for maximizing the throughput of the CR network while appropriately protecting the primary network. The sensing time is optimized by utilizing the derived detection and false alarm probabilities of the GED. The proposed GED does not suffer from signal to noise ratio (SNR) wall (i.e., robust against noise variance uncertainty) and outperforms the existing signal detectors. Moreover, the relationship between the proposed GED and conventional energy detector (CED) is quantified analytically. We show that the optimal sensing times with perfect and imperfect noise variances are not the same. In particular, when the frame duration is 2s, and SNR is -20dB, and each of the bandwidths of the white and target sub-bands is 6MHz, the optimal sensing times are 28.5ms and 50.6ms with perfect and imperfect noise variances, respectively.Comment: Accepted in CROWNCOM, June 2014, Oulu, Finlan

Compressed sensing based cyclic feature spectrum sensing for cognitive radios

Spectrum sensing is currently one of the most challenging design problems in cognitive radio. A robust spectrum sensing technique is important in allowing implementation of a practical dynamic spectrum access in noisy and interference uncertain environments. In addition, it is desired to minimize the sensing time, while meeting the stringent cognitive radio application requirements. To cope with this challenge, cyclic spectrum sensing techniques have been proposed. However, such techniques require very high sampling rates in the wideband regime and thus are costly in hardware implementation and power consumption. In this thesis the concept of compressed sensing is applied to circumvent this problem by utilizing the sparsity of the two-dimensional cyclic spectrum. Compressive sampling is used to reduce the sampling rate and a recovery method is developed for re- constructing the sparse cyclic spectrum from the compressed samples. The reconstruction solution used, exploits the sparsity structure in the two-dimensional cyclic spectrum do-main which is different from conventional compressed sensing techniques for vector-form sparse signals. The entire wideband cyclic spectrum is reconstructed from sub-Nyquist-rate samples for simultaneous detection of multiple signal sources. After the cyclic spectrum recovery two methods are proposed to make spectral occupancy decisions from the recovered cyclic spectrum: a band-by-band multi-cycle detector which works for all modulation schemes, and a fast and simple thresholding method that works for Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) signals only. In addition a method for recovering the power spectrum of stationary signals is developed as a special case. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed spectrum sensing algorithms can significantly reduce sampling rate without sacrifcing performance. The robustness of the algorithms to the noise uncertainty of the wireless channel is also shown