Utilization of idle time slot in spectrum sensing under noise uncertainty

<p>Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio (CR) is a critical process as it directly influences the accuracy of detection. Noise uncertainty affects the reliability of detecting vacant holes in the spectrum, thus limiting the access of that spectrum by secondary users (SUs). In such uncertain environment; SUs sense the received power of a primary user (PU) independently with different measures of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Long sensing time serves in mitigating the effect of noise uncertainty, but on the cost of throughput performance of CR system. In this paper, the scheme of an asynchronous and crossed sensing-reporting is presented. The scheme reduces energy consumption during sensing process without affecting the detection accuracy. Exploiting the included idle time (𝑇𝑖) in sensing time slot; each SU collects power samples with higher SNR directly performs the reporting process to a fusion center (FC) consecutively. The FC terminates the sensing and reporting processes at a specific sensing time that corresponds to the lowest SNR (𝑆𝑁𝑅𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙). Furthermore, this integrated scheme aims at optimizing the total frame duration (𝑇𝑓). Mathematical expressions of the scheme are obtained. Analytical results show the efficiency of the scheme in terms of energy saving and throughput increment under noise uncerainty.</p>

Analysis of the Impact of Detection Threshold Adjustments and Noise Uncertainty on Energy Detection Performance in MIMO-OFDM Cognitive Radio Systems

Due to the capability of the effective usage of the radio frequency spectrum, a concept known as cognitive radio has undergone a broad exploitation in real implementations. Spectrum sensing as a core function of the cognitive radio enables secondary users to monitor the frequency band of primary users and its exploitation in periods of availability. In this work, the efficiency of spectrum sensing performed with the energy detection method realized through the square-law combining of the received signals at secondary users has been analyzed. Performance evaluation of the energy detection method was done for the wireless system in which signal transmission is based on Multiple-Input Multiple-Output—Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. Although such transmission brings different advantages to wireless communication systems, the impact of noise variations known as noise uncertainty and the inability of selecting an optimal signal level threshold for deciding upon the presence of the primary user signal can compromise the sensing precision of the energy detection method. Since the energy detection may be enhanced by dynamic detection threshold adjustments, this manuscript analyses the influence of detection threshold adjustments and noise uncertainty on the performance of the energy detection spectrum sensing method in single-cell cognitive radio systems. For the evaluation of an energy detection method based on the square-law combining technique, the mathematical expressions of the main performance parameters used for the assessment of spectrum sensing efficiency have been derived. The developed expressions were further assessed by executing the algorithm that enabled the simulation of the energy detection method based on the square-law combining technique in Multiple-Input Multiple-Output—Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing cognitive radio systems. The obtained simulation results provide insights into how different levels of detection threshold adjustments and noise uncertainty affect the probability of detection of primary user signals. It is shown that higher signal-to-noise-ratios, the transmitting powers of primary user, the number of primary user transmitting and the secondary user receiving antennas, the number of sampling points and the false alarm probabilities improve detection probability. The presented analyses establish the basis for understanding the energy detection operation through the possibility of exploiting the different combinations of operating parameters which can contribute to the improvement of spectrum sensing efficiency of the energy detection method.

An Effective Adaptive Threshold Based Compressive Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Spectrum sensing is playing a vital role in Cognitive Radio networks. Wideband spectrum sensing increases the speed of sensing but which in turn requires higher sampling rate and also increases the complexity of hardware and also power consumption. Compression based sensing reduces the sampling rate by using Sub-Nyquist sampling but the compression and the reconstruction problem exists. In compression based spectrum sensing, noise uncertainty is one of the major performance degradation factor. To reduce this degradation, compressive measurements based sensing with adaptive threshold is proposed. In this technique compressed signal is sensed without any reconstruction of the signal. When the nodes are mobile in the low SNR region, the noise uncertainty degrades the performance of spectrum sensing. To conquer this problem, noise variance is estimated using parametric estimation technique and the threshold is varied adaptively. In the low SNR region, this proposed technique reduces the effect of noise and improves the spectrum sensing performance.