Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks and metacognition for dynamic spectrum sharing between radar and communication system: A review

The massive growth in mobile users and wireless technologies has resulted in increased data traffic and created demand for additional radio spectrum. This growing demand for radio spectrum has resulted in spectrum congestion and mandated the need for coexistence between radar and interfering communication emitters. To address the aforementioned issues, it is critical to review existing policies and evaluate new technologies that can utilize spectrum in an efficient and intelligent manner. Cognitive radio and cognitive radar are two promising technologies that exploit spectrum using dynamic spectrum access techniques. Additionally, introducing the bio-inspired concept ‘metacognition’ in a cognitive process has shown to increase the effectiveness and robustness of the cognitive radio and cognitive radar system. Metacognition is a high-order thinking agent that monitors and regulates the cognition process through a feedback and control process called the perception–action cycle. Extensive research has been done in the field of spectrum sensing in cognitive radio and spectral coexistence between radar and communication systems. This paper provides a detailed classification of spectrum sensing schemes and explains how dynamic spectrum access strategies share the spectrum between radar and communication systems. In addition to this, the fundamentals of cognitive radio, its architecture, spectrum management framework, and metacognition concept in radar are discussed. Furthermore, this paper presents various research issues, challenges, and future research directions associated with spectrum sensing in cognitive radar and dynamic spectrum access strategies in cognitive radar.     

Design and implementation of spectrum sensing for cognitive radios with a frequency-hopping primary system

In this work, spectrum sensing for cognitive radios is considered in the presence of multiple Primary Users (PU) using frequency-hopping communication over a set of frequency bands. The detection performance of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) Average Ratio (FAR) algorithm is obtained in closed-form, for a given FFT size and number of PUs. The effective throughput of the Secondary Users (SU) is formulated as an optimization problem with a constraint on the maximum allowable interference on the primary network. Given the hopping period of the PUs, the sensing duration that maximizes the SU throughput is derived. The results are validated using Monte Carlo simulations. Further, an implementation of the FAR algorithm on the Lyrtech (now, Nutaq) small form factor software defined radio development platform is presented, and the performance recorded through the hardware is observed to corroborate well with that obtained through simulations, allowing for implementation losses.     

Robust detection analysis of linear cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio networks

Robust detection is employed in this work to cope with uncertainties on the channel gains and the noise power levels in a cognitive radio system based on linear cooperative spectrum sensing. The minimum number of samples required to achieve given false-alarm and missed-detection probabilities is derived as a function of the system parameter uncertainty levels and the nominal SNRs. A lower bound to the received symbol energy required to achieve reliable system operation is derived. This lower bound extends the concept of SNR wall to the case of a cooperative CR system with multiple secondary users. Then, a symmetric CR system scenario is investigated analytically and by numerical simulations. Simple asymptotic results are obtained in this case to relate the minimum number of samples required and the system parameters.     

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     

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.     

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.     

基于改进混合蛙跳算法的认知无线电协作频谱感知

提出了一种改进的混合蛙跳算法（shuffled frog leaping algorithm,SFLA）,并提出了基于改进SFLA的认知无线电协作频谱感知方法,通过仿真对改进SFLA算法性能与传统SFLA算法性能进行了比较,并对本文提出的基于改进SFLA的协作感知方法与已有的基于修正偏差因子（modified deflection coefficient,MDC）的协作感知方法性能进行了比较.结果表明改进SFLA算法性能优于传统SFLA;基于改进SFLA的协作感知方法比MDC方法能获得更大的检测概率,验证 关键词： 认知无线电 频谱感知 混合蛙跳算法     

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%).     

A cost-effective approach for spectrum sensing using beamforming

Spectrum sensing (SS) is one of the principal challenges on which the mobile communication is based on. Identifying the available frequency bands, also called white spaces, is the main issue. A novel blind approach for SS in the narrowband context is proposed in order to improve the signal detection. Considering a channel with its angle of arrival (AoA), we use beamforming technique to exploit the maximum and minimum angular energy. Both theoretical developments of the threshold and performance analysis are developed. To validate our contribution, the analytical results of the performance developed in this paper are compared with those from simulation. A comparison of state-of-the-art SS method using the eigenvalue decomposition is provided which brings an interesting trade-off between complexity and performance. Finally, simulation results considering the probability of misdetection under very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are presented.     

Analysis of degrees of freedom under mixture Gaussian model in cognitive radio systems

We propose a mixture-Gaussian model for a cognitive radio channel to analyze the interplay between the interference in the system and the degrees-of-freedom (DOF), i.e., the average number of channel uses per transmission frame, used by the secondary user (SU) for communications in the long run. In contrast to the conventional studies, we assume that the SU receiver (SU-RX) does not precisely know whether the primary-user (PU) transmitter is on or off. Due to this assumption the resulting interference channel is mixture-Gaussian. Our objective is to find the optimal sensing threshold and sensing time for the signal detector used by the SU transmitter (SU-TX). Our formulation of the optimization problem reflects the trade-off between SU-TX’s DOF for communications and that for detection. Both the DOFs affect PU’s interference to SU, and SU’s interference to PU. The latter interference causes PU performance degradation, which is kept within tolerable range as a constraint. As a further contribution, we define interference regimes for SU performance on the basis of PU transmission power level. We also address the scenario when PU receiver uses the nearest neighbor decoding while wrongly anticipating that the channel is Gaussian. Finally, we demonstrate that even if SU-TX’s signal detector performs suboptimally, SU can still achieve the optimal detector’s performance in the high interference regime by adjusting the sensing parameters.     

Deep Q-learning based optimal resource allocation method for energy harvested cognitive radio networks

In this article, we propose a deep Q-learning based algorithm for optimal resource allocation in energy harvested cognitive radio networks (EH-CRN). In EH-CRN, channel resources of primary users (PU) networks are shared with secondary users (SU) and energy harvesting allows nodes of the CRN to acquire energy from the environment for operation sustainability. However, amount of energy harvested from the environment is not fixed and requires dynamic allocation of resources for obtaining optimum network and throughput capacity. In this work, we overcome the limitations of existing Q-learning based resource allocation schemes which are constrained by large state-space systems and have slow convergence. Proposed deep Q-learning based algorithm improves the resource allocation in EH-CRN, while considering quality of service (QoS), energy and interference constraints. Simulation results show that proposed algorithm provide improved convergence and better resource utilization compared to other techniques in literature.     

认知无线电网络中利用FEC和DE的多节点频谱感知算法

针对认知无线电网络(CRN)中空闲频谱感知困难的问题,本文提出了基于前向纠错和差分进化算法的多节点频谱感知算法。首先,利用基于差分进化算法的协同检测完成信号感知;然后,研究了信道噪声对频谱感知性能的影响;最后,分析了前向纠错技术在信道存在噪声时对频谱感知性能的影响。仿真实验将纠错和无纠错控制信道的不同信噪比作为依据,采用三种不同的检测方法评估了本文算法。仿真实验结果表明,在存在噪声的认知无线电网络中,本文算法提高了系统的性能和检测概率,且协同感知算法的性能随着节点数目的增加而提高,该算法适合应用于实时性要求较高的应用程序。     

用于认知无线电协作频谱感知的混合蛙跳算法群体初始化技术

提出了一种用于认知无线电线性加权协作频谱感知的改进混合蛙跳算法(shuffled frog leaping algorithm, SFLA) 的群体初始化技术, 提出在SFLA初始群体中包含基于修正偏差因子所得的解, 从而改进算法初期性能. 仿真结果表明相比于传统群体初始化技术, 本文所提出的群体初始化技术能够以更快的速率得到期望解, 从而节约计算时间, 更有利于实时应用 关键词： 认知无线电 频谱感知 混合蛙跳算法 群体初始化     

CEAR: A cooperation based energy aware reward scheme for next generation green cognitive radio networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) networks are envisioned as a key empowering technology of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication networks, which solves the major issues of 5G, like high-speed data transmission, seamless connectivity, and increased demand for mobile data. Another significant characteristic of the 5G network is green communications, as energy consumption from the communication field is predicted to rise remarkably by the year 2030. In this work, we are concerned about energy-related issues and propose a cooperation-based energy-aware reward scheme (CEAR) for next-generation green CR networks. The proposed CEAR scheme is based on the antenna and temporal diversity of the primary users (PUs). For providing the service to the PUs, the users of another network called cognitive users (CUs) work as a cooperative relay node, and, in return, they get more spectrum access opportunities as a reward from the primary network. The CUs with delay-tolerant data packets take a cooperative decision by recognizing the availability and traffic load of PUs, channel state information, and data transmission requirements. We utilize the optimal stopping protocol for solving the decision-making problem and use the backward induction method to obtain the optimal cooperative solution. The simulation results reveal notable enhancements in energy efficiency (EE) of CUs compared with other cooperative schemes. The proposed CEAR scheme is more energy-efficient for ultra-dense network deployment because results show that the CU’s EE, spectral efficiency (SE), and throughput improved with the increase of PUs.     

Cooperative spectrum sensing based on a modified shuffled frog leaping algorithm in 5G network

The explosion of different types of wireless communications is leading to an impending spectrum famine. As a result, spectrum sensing has gained increasing interest from governments, industry and regulators. In this paper, a novel approach for cooperative spectrum sensing is proposed based on a modified shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA). This approach is to fuse the perceived results of multiple nodes, and to improve the detection reliability. Simulations are used to compare the performance of the modified SFLA to the conventional one. The performance of the proposed cooperative spectrum sensing method based on the modified SFLA and that of the cooperative spectrum sensing method using modified deflection coefficient (MDC) are also compared. Results show that the proposed SFLA outperforms the traditional SFLA, and the proposed cooperative spectrum sensing method based on the modified SFLA gives higher miss detection probability than the MDC-based method, which validates the effectiveness of the modified SFLA-based cooperative sensing method.     

Spectrum sensing for OFDM signals using pilot induced cyclostationarity in the presence of cyclic frequency offset

In this paper, the problem of spectrum sensing of OFDM signals for cognitive radios is considered. It is proposed to detect the cyclostationary features introduced in an OFDM signal due to inter-pilot correlation. The performance of the proposed detector is derived and verified in case of AWGN channels. It is observed that the performance of cyclostationary detectors relies on the knowledge of the exact value of the cyclic frequency of the signal of interest. However, an offset in the cyclic frequency may arise due to several reasons. Therefore, for the proposed detector to perform reliably, there is a need to estimate the cyclic frequency offset. The Cramer–Rao bound for the cyclic frequency offset (CFO) estimator is derived, and based on it, two algorithms to estimate and compensate for the CFO are proposed. Simulation results are then used to study the performance of the proposed detection technique under Rayleigh fading both in the presence and the absence of CFO. The performance of the proposed system model is also studied under fast fading, and an alternative test statistic is proposed.     

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.     

A spectrum handoff scheme for optimal network selection in Cognitive Radio vehicular networks: A game theoretic auction theory approach

The recent strides in vehicular networks have emerged as a convergence of multi radio access networks having different user preferences, multiple application requirements and multiple device types. In future Cognitive Radio (CR) vehicular networks deployment, multiple radio access networks may coexist in the overlapping areas having different characteristics in terms of multiple attributes. Hence, it becomes a challenge for CR vehicular node to select the optimal network for the spectrum handoff decision. A game theoretic auction theory approach is interdisciplinary effective approach to select the optimal network for spectrum handoff. The competition between different CR vehicular node and access networks can be formulated as multi-bidder bidding to provide its services to CR vehicular node. The game theory is the branch of applied mathematics which make intelligent decision to select the optimal alternative from predetermined alternatives. Hence, this paper investigates a spectrum handoff scheme for optimal network selection using game theoretic auction theory approach in CR vehicular networks. The paper has also proposed a new cost function based multiple attribute decision making method which outperforms other existing methods. Numerical results revel that the proposed scheme is effective for spectrum handoff for optimal network selection among multiple available networks.