Dynamic Geospatial Spectrum Modelling: Taxonomy, Options and Consequences

Much of the research in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) has focused on opportunistic access in the temporal domain. While this has been quite useful in establishing the technical feasibility of DSA systems, it has missed large sections of the overall DSA problem space. In this paper, we argue that the spatio-temporal operating context of specific environments matters to the selection of the appropriate technology for learning context information. We identify twelve potential operating environments and compare four context awareness approaches (on-board sensing, databases, sensor networks, and cooperative sharing) for these environments. Since our point of view is overall system cost and efficiency, this analysis has utility for those regulators whose objectives are reducing system costs and enhancing system efficiency. We conclude that regulators should pay attention to the operating environment of DSA systems when determining which approaches to context learning to encourage

On the Combined Effect of Directional Antennas and Imperfect Spectrum Sensing upon Ergodic Capacity of Cognitive Radio Systems

We consider a cognitive radio system, consisting of a primary transmitter (PUtx), a primary receiver (PUrx), a secondary transmitter (SUtx), and a secondary receiver (SUrx). The secondary users (SUs) are equipped with steerable directional antennas. We assume the SUs and primary users (PUs) coexist and the SUtx knows the geometry of network. We find the ergodic capacity of the channel between SUtx and SUrx , and study how spectrum sensing errors affect the capacity. In our system, the SUtx first senses the spectrum and then transmits data at two power levels, according to the result of sensing. The optimal SUtx transmit power levels and the optimal directions of SUtx transmit antenna and SUrx receive antenna are obtained by maximizing the ergodic capacity, subject to average transmit power and average interference power constraints. To study the effect of fading channel, we considered three scenarios: 1) when SUtx knows fading channels between SUtx and PUrx, PUtx and SUrx, SUtx and SUrx, 2) when SUtx knows only the channel between SUtx and SUrx, and statistics of the other two channels, and, 3) when SUtx only knows the statistics of these three fading channels. For each scenario, we explore the optimal SUtx transmit power levels and the optimal directions of SUtx and SUrx antennas, such that the ergodic capacity is maximized, while the power constraints are satisfied

Directional Relays for Multi-Hop Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we investigate power allocation and beamforming in a relay assisted cognitive radio (CR) network. Our objective is to maximize the performance of the CR network while limiting interference in the direction of the primary users (PUs). In order to achieve these goals, we first consider joint power allocation and beamforming for cognitive nodes in direct links. Then, we propose an optimal power allocation strategy for relay nodes in indirect transmissions. Unlike the conventional cooperative relaying networks, the applied relays are equipped with directional antennas to further reduce the interference to PUs and meet the CR network requirements. The proposed approach employs genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the optimization problems. Numerical simulation results illustrate the quality of service (QoS) satisfaction in both primary and secondary networks. These results also show that notable improvements are achieved in the system performance if the conventional omni-directional relays are replaced with directional ones

Full-Duplex Cognitive Radio: A New Design Paradigm for Enhancing Spectrum Usage

With the rapid growth of demand for ever-increasing data rate, spectrum resources have become more and more scarce. As a promising technique to increase the efficiency of the spectrum utilization, cognitive radio (CR) technique has the great potential to meet such a requirement by allowing un-licensed users to coexist in licensed bands. In conventional CR systems, the spectrum sensing is performed at the beginning of each time slot before the data transmission. This unfortunately results in two major problems: 1) transmission time reduction due to sensing, and 2) sensing accuracy impairment due to data transmission. To tackle these problems, in this paper we present a new design paradigm for future CR by exploring the full-duplex (FD) techniques to achieve the simultaneous spectrum sensing and data transmission. With FD radios equipped at the secondary users (SUs), SUs can simultaneously sense and access the vacant spectrum, and thus, significantly improve sensing performances and meanwhile increase data transmission efficiency. The aim of this article is to transform the promising conceptual framework into the practical wireless network design by addressing a diverse set of challenges such as protocol design and theoretical analysis. Several application scenarios with FD enabled CR are elaborated, and key open research directions and novel algorithms in these systems are discussed

Peak to average power ratio based spatial spectrum sensing for cognitive radio systems

The recent convergence of wireless standards for incorporation of spatial dimension in wireless systems has made spatial spectrum sensing based on Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of the received signal, a promising approach. This added dimension is principally exploited for stream multiplexing, user multiplexing and spatial diversity. Considering such a wireless environment for primary users, we propose an algorithm for spectrum sensing by secondary users which are also equipped with multiple antennas. The proposed spatial spectrum sensing algorithm is based on the PAPR of the spatially received signals. Simulation results show the improved performance once the information regarding spatial diversity of the primary users is incorporated in the proposed algorithm. Moreover, through simulations a better performance is achieved by using different diversity schemes and different parameters like sensing time and scanning interval