Compressive Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Networks

A cognitive radio system has the ability to observe and learn from the environment, adapt to the environmental conditions, and use the radio spectrum more efficiently. It allows secondary users (SUs) to use the primary users (PUs) channels when they are not being utilized. Cognitive radio involves three main processes: spectrum sensing, deciding, and acting. In the spectrum sensing process, the channel occupancy is measured with spectrum sensing techniques in order to detect unused channels. In the deciding process, sensing results are analyzed and decisions are made based on these results. In the acting process, actions are made by adjusting the transmission parameters to enhance the cognitive radio performance. One of the main challenges of cognitive radio is the wideband spectrum sensing. Existing spectrum sensing techniques are based on a set of observations sampled by an ADC at the Nyquist rate. However, those techniques can sense only one channel at a time because of the hardware limitations on the sampling rate. In addition, in order to sense a wideband spectrum, the wideband is divided into narrow bands or multiple frequency bands. SUs have to sense each band using multiple RF frontends simultaneously, which can result in a very high processing time, hardware cost, and computational complexity. In order to overcome this problem, the signal sampling should be as fast as possible even with high dimensional signals. Compressive sensing has been proposed as a low-cost solution to reduce the processing time and accelerate the scanning process. It allows reducing the number of samples required for high dimensional signal acquisition while keeping the essential information.