On spectrum sensing in cognitive radio CDMA networks with beamforming

In this paper, the performance of cognitive radio (CR) code division multiple access (CDMA) networks is analyzed in the presence of receive beamforming at the base stations (BSs). More precisely, we analyze, through simulations, the performance achievable by a CR user, with and without spectrum sensing, in a three-cell scenario. Uplink communications are considered. Three different schemes for spectrum sensing with beamforming are presented, together with a scheme without spectrum sensing. CR users belong to a cognitive radio network (CRN) which is coexisting with a primary radio network (PRN). Both the CRN and the PRN are CDMA based. The CRN is assumed to utilize beamforming for its CR users. Soft hand-off (HO) and power control are considered in both the CRN and the PRN. The impact of beamforming on the system performance is analyzed, considering various metrics. In particular, we evaluate the performance of the proposed systems in terms of outage probability, blocking probability, and average data rate of CR users. The results obtained clearly indicate that significant performance improvements can be obtained by CR users with the help of beamforming. The impact of several system parameters on the performance of the three considered spectrum sensing schemes with beamforming is analyzed. Our results, in terms of probability of outage, show that the relative improvement brought by the use of beamforming is higher in the absence of spectrum sensing (reduction of 80%) than in the presence of spectrum sensing (reduction of 42%).     

Joint optimal fair cooperative spectrum sensing and transmission in cognitive radio

Since the sensing power consumption of cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) will decrease the throughput of secondary users (SU) in cognitive radio (CR), a joint optimal model of fair CSS and transmission is proposed in this paper, which can compensate the sensing overhead of cooperative SUs. The model uses the periodic listen-before-transmission method, where each SU is assigned a portion of channel bandwidth, when the primary user (PU) is estimated to be free by the coordinator. Then, a joint optimization problem of local sensing time, number of cooperative SUs, transmission bandwidth and power is formulated, which can compensate the sensing overhead of cooperative SUs appropriately through choosing suitable compensating parameter. The proposed optimization problem can be solved by the Polyblock algorithm. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional model, the total system throughput of the fairness cooperation model decreases slightly, but the total throughput of the cooperative SUs improves obviously.     

Interference mitigation for cognitive radio MIMO systems based on practical precoding

In this paper, we propose two subspace-projection-based precoding schemes, namely, full-projection (FP)- and partial-projection (PP)-based precoding, for a cognitive radio multiple-input multiple-output (CR-MIMO) network to mitigate its interference to a primary time-division-duplexing (TDD) system. The proposed precoding schemes are capable of estimating interference channels between CR and primary networks, and incorporating the interference from the primary to the CR system into CR precoding via a novel sensing approach. Then, the CR performance and resulting interference of the proposed precoding schemes are analyzed and evaluated. By fully projecting the CR transmission onto a null space of the interference channels, the FP-based precoding scheme can effectively avoid interfering the primary system with boosted CR throughput. While, the PP-based scheme is able to further improve the CR throughput by partially projecting its transmission onto the null space.     

Quadratic covariance matrix-based cooperative spectrum sensing method by using an evolutionary algorithm

Cognitive radio (CR) is a practical technology to solve the current low utilization of spectrum resources, and spectrum sensing is the most critical technique in a CR network. In this paper, a genetic simulated annealing algorithm based on quadratic covariance matrix and information geometry is proposed for cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) to enhance the performance in the low signal-noise ratio (SNR). Firstly, the quadratic covariance matrix of cooperative secondary users (SUs) is used as the characteristic matrix to perform feature extraction. Secondly, based on the information geometry, the characteristic matrix is mapped on the statistical manifold to avoid information loss. Furthermore, the genetic simulated annealing algorithm is used to obtain a classifier on the statistical manifold, and the mutation process is improved by a new mutation operator to accelerate the convergence speed of the whole algorithm. Finally, the classifier is employed to implement spectrum sensing. In the simulation analysis, the proposed method has better spectrum sensing performance than the popular various methods under low SNR and faster convergence speed.     

Opportunistic spectrum access for TDMA-based cognitive radio networks

In this paper, opportunistic spectrum access is proposed for TDMA-based cognitive radio networks. In TDMA-based networks, the time is divided into slots with fixed length one by one. If a primary user (PU) needs to transmit data, one or several slots will be used. Otherwise, the slots are idle and can be utilized by secondary users (SUs). When SUs want to use the licensed channel, they should sense the channel at the beginning period of each slot. Then SUs exchange their sensing results and make the same decision about the channel state (idle or used by PUs), which could reduce the probability of false sensing. The aforementioned duration is called spectrum sensing phase. When SUs decide there is an idle channel, they contend to use the channel at the rest time of the slot. The duration is called access phase. In this period, SUs contend the channel with backoff counters. When the remaining time is less than one data transmission duration, SUs cannot transmit data packets. Therefore, the remaining time is wasted. To solve this problem, SUs transmit control packets with small length in the remaining time instead. The SU who exchange control packets successfully reserves the channel and sends a data packet prior to other SUs in access phase of the next idle slot. Obviously, this reserved transmission is without collision. The independent spectrum sensing, channel state decision and control packets reservation influence the performance of SUs. The proposed scheme is formulated with all above factors. Simulations which consist with the numerical results show the proposed access scheme achieve higher throughput than the existed scheme without channel reservation.     

A single-channel single-winner auction model for homogeneous channel allocation in CRNs

Cognitive radio (CR) is a novel intelligent technology which enables opportunistic access to temporarily unused licensed frequency bands. A key functionality of CR is to distribute free channels efficiently amongst Secondary Users (SUs) boosting spectrum usage to assist the escalating wireless applications world wide. In this context, this paper introduces a channel allocation mechanism which enables SUs (CR enabled unlicensed users) to dynamically access unused spectrum bands to fulfill their spectrum needs. We model the channel allocation problem as a sealed-bid single-sided auction which primarily aims at maximizing the overall spectrum utilization. Market based spectrum auctions in CR networks motivate licensed users to participate and lease their under utilized radio resources to gain monetary benefits. Sequential bidding is applied to this model for auctioning homogeneous channels, which reduces communication overhead. Bid submission takes into account two major CR constraints, namely, dynamics in spectrum opportunities and differences in channel availability time, which on incorporation provide disruption free data transmission to the SUs. We reduce resource wastage in this model by performing multiple auction rounds. Application of second price auction determines winning bidders and their respective payments to auctioneer. The design of our auction mechanism is supported with the proofs of truthfulness and individually rational properties. Furthermore, experimental results indicate that our model outperforms an existing auction method. Spectrum utilization values show 22 to 75% improvement in our model with changing number of SUs, and 23 to 93% improvement in our model with changing number of channels.     

Route selection for interference minimization to primary users in cognitive radio ad hoc networks: A cross layer approach

An opportunistic routing problem in a cognitive radio ad hoc network is investigated with an aim to minimize the interference to primary users (PUs) and under the constraint of a minimum end-to-end data rate for secondary users (SUs). Both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying techniques are considered for message forwarding by SU nodes in the network. Unlike popular transmit power control based solutions for interference management in cognitive radio networks, we adopt a cross layer approach. The optimization problem is formulated as a joint power control, channel assignment and route selection problem. Next, closed form expression for transmission power is derived and corresponding channel selection scheme and routing metric are designed based on this solution. The proposed route selection schemes are shown to depend not only on gains of the interference channels between SUs and PUs but also on the values of the spectrum sensing parameters at the SU nodes in the network. Two distributed routing schemes are proposed based on our analysis; (i) optimal_DF and (ii) suboptimal_AF. The routing schemes could be implemented using existing table driven as well as on demand routing protocols. Extensive simulation results are provided to evaluate performance of our proposed schemes in random multihop networks. Results show significant reduction in PUs’ average interference experience and impressive performance as opportunistic routing schemes can be achieved by our schemes compared to traditional shortest path based routing schemes. Performance improvement is also reported over prominent recent schemes.     

一种基于授权信道特性的认知无线电频谱检测算法

针对认知无线电系统中频谱检测的频率直接影响系统容量以及与授权用户产生冲突的概率问题,分析了授权用户频谱使用的特性, 对授权用户行为进行统计建模, 提出一种自适应频谱检测算法. 引入控制因子, 在保证认知无线电系统稳定性的约束下, 自适应调整频谱感知的频率从而提高频谱利用率并减小系统冲突概率和检测开销, 进而降低了系统的能量消耗. 仿真结果表明, 该算法在保证不对授权用户产生干扰和一定的系统稳定性条件下, 有效地提高了系统的容量,并且具有良好的实用性和灵活性. 关键词： 认知无线电 自适应频谱检测 绿色通信 最大似然     

Traffic-Aware Green Cognitive Radio

Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) has emerged as an effective solution to the spectrum under-utilization problem, by providing secondary users (SUs) an opportunistic access to the unoccupied frequency bands of primary users (PUs). Most of the current research on CRN are based on the assumption that the SU always has a large amount of data to transmit. This leads to the objective of SU throughput maximization with a constraint on the allowable interference to the PU. However, in many of the practical scenarios, the data arrival process of the SU closely follows an ON–OFF traffic model, and thus the usual throughput optimization framework may no longer be suitable. In this paper, we propose an intelligent data scheduling strategy which minimizes the average transmission power of the SU while maintaining the transmission delay to be sufficiently small. The data scheduling problem has been formulated as a finite horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) with an appropriate cost function. Dynamic programming approach has been adopted to arrive at an optimal solution. Our findings show that the average transmitted power for our proposed approach can be as small as 36.5% of the power required for usual throughput maximization technique with insignificant increase in average delay.     

Single decision reporting for cooperative spectrum sensing under erroneous feedback channels with Byzantine attack

Spectrum sensing based on a single user suffers from low detection performance due to fading, shadowing, and hidden node problems. Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is thought to be a potential method to overcome these issues and improve detection performance in determining the available spectrum in cognitive radio (CR). However, CSS suffers in case of erroneous reporting channels, and it is also susceptible to Byzantine attacks by malicious users (MUs). In this paper, we first analyze the traditional CSS under erroneous feedback channels. And then, we extend the analysis to include erroneous reporting channels in the presence of the Byzantine attack. We propose a single decision reporting (SD-R) algorithm immune to erroneous reporting channels. The proposed algorithm also improves the performance under the Byzantine attack. With the proposed algorithm, MUs can attempt only false alarm attacks, whereas the miss detection attack is not possible. An extensive analysis is carried out, and the plots are shown to prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm.     

Optimal sensing energy and transmission interval in hybrid overlay–underlay cognitive radio networks with energy harvesting

In this work, we present a new concept called “transmission interval” in a hybrid overlay/underlay cognitive radio network. A transmission interval consists of a sequence of time slots during which the secondary user (SU) transmits its data using the optimal mode based on its current state. After the transmission interval ends, the SU has to choose between staying idle for a single time slot to save energy for future possible transmission, transmitting using the underlay mode without sensing to optimize the usage of the limited amount of available energy, or sensing the channel and transmitting using either overlay or underlay mode depending on the primary user (PU) state. The energy harvesting technology is also considered in the presence of multiple PUs and multiple SUs. For the SU network, a sequential decision problem is formulated using the mixed observable Markov decision process to determine the optimal sensing energy and the optimal transmission interval length that maximize the SU network throughput and minimize both the consumed energy and the interference to the PUs. Numerical results show that applying the transmission interval concept increases the SU network throughput and decreases the interference to the PUs compared to conventional models. Moreover, adding the action of underlay transmission without sensing increases the SU network throughput.     

A tree-structured DFT filter bank based spectrum detector for estimation of radio channel edge frequencies in cognitive radios

Cognitive Radio (CR) aims to provide efficient spectrum utilization in spectrum scarce wireless environments. One of the key CR functionalities is the spectrum sensing, which allows CRs to monitor the electromagnetic spectrum and detect unused bands of spectrum. Wideband spectrum sensing needs to be employed for better spectrum opportunity detection and interference avoidance both in the case of commercial and military applications. Accurate sensing needs to be employed for blocker detection in commercial systems such as LTE for the design of transmit/receive path. In military radios, the challenge lies in the robust detection of the location of the center frequencies and bandwidths of individual radio channels in the wideband input signal. In this paper, an energy detector based on tree-structured discrete Fourier transform based filter bank (TDFTFB) is proposed for detecting the edges of the channels in the spectrum. The proposed method is compared with the conventional wavelets based method for complexity and performance. The design example and simulations show that the gate count resource utilization of the proposed detection scheme is 22.9% lesser than the wavelets method at the cost of a slight degradation (0.5%) in detection accuracy. Over-the-air tests performed using Universal Software Radio Peripheral 2 (USRP2) and MATLAB/SIMULINK showed that the present method is not input specific whereas the conventional wavelet based approach depends on the spectral location of the input.     

Distributed dynamic spectrum access through multi-agent deep recurrent Q-learning in cognitive radio network

This paper addresses the problem of distributed dynamic spectrum access in a cognitive radio (CR) environment utilizing deep recurrent reinforcement learning. Specifically, the network consists of multiple primary users (PU) transmitting intermittently in their respective channels, while the secondary users (SU) attempt to access the channels when PUs are not transmitting. The problem is challenging considering the decentralized nature of CR network where each SU attempts to access a vacant channel, without coordination with other SUs, which result in collision and throughput loss. To address this issue, a multi-agent environment is considered where each of the SUs perform independent reinforcement learning to learn the appropriate policy to transmit opportunistically so as to minimize collisions with other users. In this article, we propose two long short-term memory (LSTM) based deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) architectures for exploiting the temporal correlation in the transmissions by various nodes in the network. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of the architecture on success rate with varying number of users in the network and partial channel observations. Simulation results are compared with other existing reinforcement learning based techniques to establish the superiority of the proposed method.     

Reinforcement learning for performance improvement in cooperative spectrum sensing

Cognitive radio (CR) can provide a promising solution to the spectrum scarcity issue for upcoming wireless communication technologies. Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is generally adopted to improve spectrum utilization and minimize interference to primary users (PUs). The performance of CSS is significantly affected by imperfect reporting channels, and it is an easy target for Byzantine attackers. This paper studies CSS under imperfect reporting channels and Byzantine attacks. We have considered centralized CSS with a hard combining fusion rule. The binary symmetric channel (BSC) is used to model the imperfect reporting channels, and a centralized independent probabilistic small scale attack model is chosen to model Byzantine attackers. We first analyze the traditional CSS (T-CSS) under the imperfect reporting channel and the Byzantine attack. The performance of T-CSS is found to be greatly affected in the considered scenarios. We propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm to detect cooperating secondary users (CSUs) experiencing weak reporting channels and Byzantine attackers. Generally, in literature, the detected malicious users (MUs) are removed to improve the performance. However, in case there are CSUs with weak reporting channels, the genuine CSUs may be detected as Byzantine attackers and hence removed. To overcome this issue, we propose a weighted sum-based CSS (WS-CSS) algorithm that can improve the CSS performance under weak reporting channels and attacks from Byzantine attackers. It is demonstrated using plots that the proposed WS-CSS algorithm significantly improves the CSS performance.     

Spectrum mobility in cognitive radio network using spectrum prediction and monitoring techniques

The spectrum mobility during data transmission is an integral part of the cognitive radio network (CRN) which is conventionally two types for instance reactive and proactive. In the reactive approach, the cognitive user (CU) switches its communication after the emergence of the primary user (PU), where the detection of emergence of PU relies either on spectrum sensing and/or monitoring. Due to certain limitations of the reactive approach such as: (1) loss at least one packet on the emergence of PU and (2) resource (bandwidth) wastage if the periodic sensing is used for mobility, the researchers have introduced the concept of proactive spectrum mobility. In this approach, the emergence of PU is predicted on the bases of pre-available spectrum information, and switching is performed before true emergence of the PU, in order to avoid even the single packet loss. However, the imperfect spectrum prediction is a major milestone for the proactive spectrum mobility. Recently, due to introduction of the spectrum monitoring simultaneous to the data transmission, the reactive approach has come into lime-light again, however, it suffers from the ‘single packet loss’ and ‘imperfect spectrum monitoring’ issues. Therefore in this paper, we have exploited the spectrum monitoring and prediction techniques, simultaneously for the spectrum mobility, in order to enhance the performance of cognitive radio network (CRN). In the proposed strategy, the decision results of the spectrum prediction and monitoring techniques are fused using AND and OR fusion rules, for the detection of emergence of PU during the data transmission. Further, the closed-form expressions of the resource wastage, achieved throughput, interference power at PU and data-loss for the proposed approaches as well as for the prediction and monitoring approaches are derived. Moreover, the simulation results for the proposed approaches are presented and validation is performed by comparing the results with prediction and monitoring approach. In a special case, when the prediction error is zero, the graphs of all metric values overlies the spectrum monitoring approach, which further validates the proposed approach.     

Secure collaborative cognitive radio based on chaotic modulation and compressive sensing

Cognitive radio (CR) is a wireless technology that is used to overcome the spectrum scarcity problem. CR includes several stages, spectrum sensing is the first stage in the CR cycle. Traditional spectrum sensing (SS) techniques have many challenges in the wideband spectrum. CR security is an important problem, since when an attacker from outside the network access the sensing information this produces an increase in sensing time and reduces the opportunities for exploiting vacant band. Compressive sensing (CS) is proposed to capture all the wideband spectrum at the same time to solve the challenges and improve the performance in the traditional techniques and then one of the traditional SS techniques are applied to the reconstructed signal for detection purpose. The sensing matrix is the core of CS must be designed in a way that produces a low reconstruction error with high compression. There are many types of sensing matrices, the chaotic matrix is the best type in terms of security, memory storage, and system performance. Few works in the literature use the chaotic matrix in CS based CR and these works have many challenges: they used sample distance in the chaotic map to generate a chaotic sequence which consumes high resources, they did not take into consideration the security in reporting channel, and they did not measure their works using real primary user (PU) signal of a practical application under fading channel and low SNR values. In this paper, we propose a chaotic CS based collaborative scenario to solve all challenges that have been presented. We proposed a chaotic matrix based on the Henon map and use the differential chaotic shift keying (DCSK) modulation to transmit the measurement vector through the reporting channel to increase the security and improve the performance under fading channel. The simulation results are tested based on a recorded real-TV signal as PU and Compressive Sampling Matching Pursuit (CoSaMP) recovery algorithm under AWGN and TDL-C fading channels in collaborative and non-collaborative scenarios. The performance of the proposed system has been measured using recovery error, mean square error (MSE), derived probability of detection (Pdrec), and sensitivity to initial values. To measure the improvement introduced by the proposed system, it is evaluated in comparison with selected chaotic and random matrices. The results show that the proposed system provides low recovery error, MSE, with high Pdrec, security, and compression under SNR equal to −30 dB in AWGN and TDL-C fading channels as compared to other matrices in the literature.     

Cooperative wideband spectrum sensing under reporting channel errors: Analysis and algorithm

This paper focuses on the performance analysis and the algorithm development for cooperative wideband spectrum sensing (CWSS) under imperfect reporting channels for cognitive radio (CR). The centralized approach with multiple distributed cooperating secondary users (CSUs) and a fusion center (FC) is considered for CWSS. Nakagami fading is used to model the channel between PUs and the CSUs. The CSUs equipped with multiple diversity antennas are considered to take advantage of both space and antenna diversity. In this work, the reporting channel model under erroneous reporting is proposed. The repetition code-based CWSS (RC-CWSS) algorithm is proposed for performance improvement. First, the modified, improved theoretical analysis of an existing algorithm called partial band Nyquist sampling-based CWSS (PBNS-CWSS) under no reporting errors is given. The theoretical analysis under an imperfect reporting channel is then carried out for the same algorithm. Then, the complete theoretical analysis for the proposed RC-CWSS algorithm is carried out. The theoretical analyses are verified using Monte-Carlo simulations. The analysis shows that the performance of CWSS is greatly affected by the reporting channel errors. Also, the RC-CWSS outperforms recently proposed state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, the effects of different parameters on the performance of the proposed algorithm are also studied.     

Cross-layer design based hybrid MAC protocol for cognitive radio network

A minimal interrupted communication link setup is the primary objective of the MAC layer. The MAC layer is responsible for accessing the communication channel. At MAC, a control channel is used in the selection of collision free paths for data transfer. Therefore, the design of the control channel plays a pivotal role in achieving desired QoS in cognitive radio (CR) technology. Various schemes of control channel design help the CR network (CRN) to obtain better performance. The reported work focuses on a hybrid MAC protocol. The novelty of the scheme lies in the process of hybridization. A cross-layer framework is proposed for hybridization. The cross-layering has been done between network and MAC layer to achieve hybridization between different control channel design approaches. The broad categorization of control channel designs is between licensed in-band and dedicated unlicensed out-band approaches. In the in-band control channel design approach, the opportunistic use of data channel as control channel fulfills the decorum of CR technology. As soon as the primary user activity rises in the data channels, the in-band approach suffers from poor performance. On the other hand, the dedicated unlicensed out-band control channel design approach provides global coverage and all-time availability but suffers from channel saturation and intruder attacks. Interference in the control channel limits the use of out-band design. This motivates authors to develop a hybrid MAC protocol that can float between licensed in-band design and unlicensed out-band design to access the control channel. The hybridization is possible by sharing a primary user free channel list (PCL) among CR nodes. In conventional hybrid MAC protocols, the PCL is shared as a control beacon in the channel. Extra packet requirement as control beacon affects the performance of CR scenario. The proposed cross-layer design based hybrid MAC protocol avoids the need of an extra control beacon for PCL transmission. Further, the hybridization helps in achieving advantages of both in-band and out-band control channel design approaches. The simulation results show that the proposed hybrid MAC protocol performs satisfactorily in terms of packet delivery ratio, average throughput, average delay and control overhead. The performances are also tested in the worst scenarios.     

Spectrum efficient power allocation schemes for OFDM cognitive radio with statistical interference constraints

In this paper, we study the power allocation problem for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based cognitive radio (CR) system. In a departure from the conventional power allocation schemes available in the literature for OFDM-based CR, we propose power allocation schemes that are augmented with spectral shaping. Active interference cancellation (AIC) is an effective spectral shaping technique for OFDM-based systems. Therefore, in particular, we propose AIC-based optimal and suboptimal power allocation schemes that aim to maximize the downlink transmission capacity of an OFDM-based CR system operating opportunistically within the licensed primary users (PUs) radio spectrum in an overlay approach. Since the CR transmitter may not have the perfect knowledge about the instantaneous channel quality between itself and the active PUs, the interference constraints imposed by each of the PUs are met in a statistical sense. We also study an optimal power allocation scheme that is augmented with raised cosine (RC) windowing-based spectral shaping. For a given power budget at the CR transmitter and the prescribed statistical interference constraints by the PUs, we demonstrate that although the on-the-run computational complexity of the proposed AIC-based optimal power allocation scheme is relatively higher, it may yield better transmission rate for the CR user compared to the RC windowing-based power allocation scheme. Further, the AIC-based suboptimal scheme has the least on-the-run computational complexity, and still may deliver performance that is comparable to that of the RC windowing-based power allocation scheme. The presented simulation results also show that both the AIC-based as well as the RC windowing-based power allocation schemes lead to significantly higher transmission rates for the CR user compared to the conventional (without any spectral shaping) optimal power allocation scheme.     

Outlier-aware cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

This paper considers the problem of cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks (CRN). Communication in CRNs may be disrupted due to the presence of malicious secondary users (SU) or channel impairments such as shadowing. This paper proposes a spatio-frequency framework that can detect and track malicious users and anomalous measurements in CRNs. The joint problem of spectrum sensing and malicious user identification is posed as an optimization problem that aims to exploit the sparsity inherent to both, spectrum occupancy and malicious user occurrence. Proposed scheme obtains improved performance by utilizing node location information, and can handle missing or inaccurate location information, and noisy SU reports. A distributed block-coordinate descent-based algorithm is proposed that is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art PCA-based approach, and is flexible enough to defeat a variety of attacks encountered in SU networks. An online algorithm, that can handle incorporate multiple SU readings sequentially and adapt to time-varying channels, primary user, and malicious user activity, is also proposed and shown to be consistent. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms.