Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Systems Through Primary User Activity Prediction

Traditional spectrum sensing techniques such as energy detection, for instance, can sense the spectrum only when the cognitive radio (CR) is is not in operation. This constraint is relaxed recently by some blind source separation techniques in which the CR can operate during spectrum sensing. The proposed method in this paper uses the fact that the primary spectrum usage is correlated across time and follows a predictable behavior. More precisely, we propose a new spectrum sensing method that can be trained over time to predict the primary user's activity and sense the spectrum even while the CR user is in operation. Performance achieved by the proposed method is compared to classical spectrum sensing methods. Simulation results provided in terms of receiver operating characteristic curves indicate that in addition to the interesting feature that the CR can transmit during spectrum sensing, the proposed method outperforms conventional spectrum sensing techniques

A Sensing Error Aware MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radios (CR) are intelligent radio devices that can sense the radio environment and adapt to changes in the radio environment. Spectrum sensing and spectrum access are the two key CR functions. In this paper, we present a spectrum sensing error aware MAC protocol for a CR network collocated with multiple primary networks. We explicitly consider both types of sensing errors in the CR MAC design, since such errors are inevitable for practical spectrum sensors and more important, such errors could have significant impact on the performance of the CR MAC protocol. Two spectrum sensing polices are presented, with which secondary users collaboratively sense the licensed channels. The sensing policies are then incorporated into p-Persistent CSMA to coordinate opportunistic spectrum access for CR network users. We present an analysis of the interference and throughput performance of the proposed CR MAC, and find the analysis highly accurate in our simulation studies. The proposed sensing error aware CR MAC protocol outperforms two existing approaches with considerable margins in our simulations, which justify the importance of considering spectrum sensing errors in CR MAC design.Comment: 21 page, technical repor

The Impact of Sensing Range on Spatial-Temporal Opportunity

In this paper, we study the impact of secondary user (SU) sensing range on spectrum access opportunity in cognitive radio networks. We first derive a closed-form ex- pression of spectrum access opportunity by taking into ac- count the random variations in number, locations and trans- mitted powers of primary users (PUs). Then, we show how SU sensing range affects spectrum access opportunity, and the tradeoff between SU sensing range and spectrum ac- cess opportunity is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize spectrum access opportunity. Furthermore, we prove that there exists an optimal SU sensing range which yields the maximum spectrum access opportunity, and nu- merical results validate our theoretical analysis

A Low-Overhead Energy Detection Based Cooperative Sensing Protocol for Cognitive Radio Systems

Cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access represent a new paradigm shift in more effective use of limited radio spectrum. One core component behind dynamic spectrum access is the sensing of primary user activity in the shared spectrum. Conventional distributed sensing and centralized decision framework involving multiple sensor nodes is proposed to enhance the sensing performance. However, it is difficult to apply the conventional schemes in reality since the overhead in sensing measurement and sensing reporting as well as in sensing report combining limit the number of sensor nodes that can participate in distributive sensing. In this paper, we shall propose a novel, low overhead and low complexity energy detection based cooperative sensing framework for the cognitive radio systems which addresses the above two issues. The energy detection based cooperative sensing scheme greatly reduces the quiet period overhead (for sensing measurement) as well as sensing reporting overhead of the secondary systems and the power scheduling algorithm dynamically allocate the transmission power of the cooperative sensor nodes based on the channel statistics of the links to the BS as well as the quality of the sensing measurement. In order to obtain design insights, we also derive the asymptotic sensing performance of the proposed cooperative sensing framework based on the mobility model. We show that the false alarm and mis-detection performance of the proposed cooperative sensing framework improve as we increase the number of cooperative sensor nodes.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, journal. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Throughput and Collision Analysis of Multi-Channel Multi-Stage Spectrum Sensing Algorithms

Multi-stage sensing is a novel concept that refers to a general class of spectrum sensing algorithms that divide the sensing process into a number of sequential stages. The number of sensing stages and the sensing technique per stage can be used to optimize performance with respect to secondary user throughput and the collision probability between primary and secondary users. So far, the impact of multi-stage sensing on network throughput and collision probability for a realistic network model is relatively unexplored. Therefore, we present the first analytical framework which enables performance evaluation of different multi-channel multi-stage spectrum sensing algorithms for Opportunistic Spectrum Access networks. The contribution of our work lies in studying the effect of the following parameters on performance: number of sensing stages, physical layer sensing techniques and durations per each stage, single and parallel channel sensing and access, number of available channels, primary and secondary user traffic, buffering of incoming secondary user traffic, as well as MAC layer sensing algorithms. Analyzed performance metrics include the average secondary user throughput and the average collision probability between primary and secondary users. Our results show that when the probability of primary user mis-detection is constrained, the performance of multi-stage sensing is, in most cases, superior to the single stage sensing counterpart. Besides, prolonged channel observation at the first stage of sensing decreases the collision probability considerably, while keeping the throughput at an acceptable level. Finally, in realistic primary user traffic scenarios, using two stages of sensing provides a good balance between secondary users throughput and collision probability while meeting successful detection constraints subjected by Opportunistic Spectrum Access communication