Spectrum sensing with active cognitive systems
Shenghui Song, Karama Hamdi, Khaled B. Letaief · IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications · 2010
Spectrum sensing is critical for cognitive systems to locate spectrum holes. In the IEEE 802.22 proposal, short quiet periods are arranged inside frames to perform a coarse intra-frame sensing as a pre-alarm for fine inter-frame sensing. However, the limited sample size of the quiet periods may not guarantee a satisfying performance and an additional burden of quiet-period synchronization is required. To improve the sensing performance, we first propose a quiet-active sensing scheme in which inactive customer-provided equipments (CPEs) will sense the channels in both the quiet and active periods. To avoid quiet-period synchronization, we further propose to utilize (optimized) active sensing, in which the quiet periods are replaced by 'quiet samples' in other domains, such as quiet sub-carriers in OFDMA systems. By doing so, we not only save the need for synchronization, but also achieve selection diversity by choosing quiet sub-carriers based on channel conditions. The proposed active sensing scheme is also promising for spectrum sharing applications where both the cognitive and primary systems can be active simultaneously.