Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio

JunaidFarooq War(1), K.V Mahesan(2), Manjunath B(3)

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PG Student, Dr. AIT, Bangalore, Karnataka, India Associate Professor, Dr. AIT, Bangalore, Karnataka, India which demands dynamic allocation of spectrum instead of static. CR is a candidate solution to meet the ever increasing demand of radio spectrum and help in managing resource in more systematic and in more efficient way. Cognitive radio is based on the concept of dynamic spectrum access. In a cognitive radio network, the secondary users are allowed to utilize the frequency bands of primary users when these bands are not currently being used. To support this spectrum reuse functionality, the secondary users are required to sense the radio frequency environment, and once the primary users are found to be active, the secondary users are required to vacate the channel within a certain amount of time. Therefore, spectrum sensing is of significant importance in cognitive radio networks. There are two parameters associated with spectrum sensing: probability of detection and probability of false alarm. The higher the probability of detection, better are the primary users protected. However, from the secondary users perspective, the lower the probability of false alarm, the more chances the channel can be reused when it is available, thus the higher the achievable throughput for the secondary network. Spectrum sensing aims to determine spectrum availability and the presence of the licensed users. Spectrum management is to predict how long the spectrum holes are likely to remain available for use to the unlicensed users. Spectrum sharing is to distribute the spectrum holes fairly among the secondary users bearing in mind usage cost. Theunderutilized frequencybandsoftheradiospectrum,ownedbylegallyli censed(primary)users,arereferredtoasspectrumholes. The effectiveness of spectrum sensing largely determines the overall spectrum utilization. A good spectrum sensing algorithm should offer high probability of detection (PD) at low probability of false alarm (PFA) for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, from a practice perspective, the algorithm has to be implementation friendly, including acceptable computational complexity. Less computation means less power assumption, which is especially meaningful for battery-powered devices. There have been some techniques for spectrum sensing, such as energy detection, matched filter detection, cyclostationary feature detection,

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Abstract:Spectrum sensing is a fundamental problem in cognitive radio. Since the statistical covariances of received signals and noise are usually different, they can be used to differentiate the case where the primary users signal is present from the case where there is only noise.Fast and efficient spectrum sensing is vital for multi- radio multi-channel cognitive radio (CR) networks. A good spectrum sensing algorithm should offer high probability of detection (PD) at low probability of false alarm (PFA) for a wide range of signal to- noise ratio (SNR). Trade-off between the complexity and the effectiveness of spectrum sensing algorithms should be taken into consideration. A fast Fourier transform (FFT) based spectrum sensing algorithm called FFT Averaging Ratio (FAR) is introduced in this paper. Parameter selection for the algorithm is considered as well, toward minimizing computational complexity. FFT Averaging Ratio algorithm is effective to detect signals at low SNR.

Key terms: Cognitive Radio (CR), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), FFT Averaging Ratio (FAR), Signalto-Noise Ratio (SNR), Power Spectral Density (PSD)

I.

INTRODUCTION

Around the globe static allocation of spectrum scheme is commonly used which is also known as command and control. In this method, the radio spectrum is divided into spectrum bands that are allocated to specific technology based services. This command and control based spectrum management framework guarantees that the radio frequency spectrum will be exclusively licensed to a license user and it can use the spectrum without any interference. This existing static approach of spectrum management model is not efficient to cater the present and future requirement of spectrum for new wireless applications which demands for higher throughput and higher mobility. ITU predicted that 1720 MHz spectrum will be required by year 2020 for new wireless technology. But although spectrum is seen as a scarce natural resource, measurements show that often there are moments in time and space where the spectrum is not being fully utilized by the services that have allocated it and therefore it is being used inefficiently

covariance-based detection, and wavelet-based detection [2], [3]. The contributions and features of this paper is that the FFT-based spectrum sensing algorithm FAR is simulated in MATLAB. To have a decision threshold insensitive to noise level, FAR uses ratio formed from one or more blocks of received signal samples as a decision variable. II. FUNCTIONAL BLOCKS COGNITIVE RADIO OF A. Algorithm Description: Fig. 1 depicts FAR algorithm, where the input is baseband discrete-time signal sampled at frequency fs, and the output is a series of vectors of two-class decisions that represent the availabilities of the channels in each time slot. The input signal is in real numbers since the phase information is not required here. Firstly, in each time slot, a block of baseband signal samples are segmented into T frames in the segmentation module. Denote t-th frame of the input samples by xt(n), n =0, 1, . . . ,N1, t = 0, 1, . . . , T 1, where N is the number of samples in a frame. Then the segmented frames are multiplied with a window function to get desired spectral shape: , = = 0,1, . . 1, = 0,1, 1

Cognitive radio includes five main functional blocks: spectrum sensing, spectrum management, spectrum sharing, spectrum mobility and transmitter-receiver handshake [4]. Spectrum sensing aims to determine spectrum availability and the presence of the licensed users (Primary users), a secondary user can only allocate to a portion of the spectrum if that portion is not used by a secondary user. Spectrum management predicts how long the spectrum holes are available for use to the unlicensed user (secondary user). Spectrum sharing is to distribute the spectrum among the secondary users according to the usage cost. Spectrum mobility is used to maintain seamless communication during the transition to better spectrum. if the portion of spectrum which is in use is required by the primary user the communication needs to be done in another portion, so spectrum mobility is required for the cognitive radio. Once a portion of the spectrum is allocated for the communication, the receiver of the communication should also know about the indicated spectrum. Hence a protocol known as transmitter-receiver handshake protocol is required for the communication between the cognitive radio nodes. III. FFT-AVERAGING-RATIO (FAR) ALGORITHM FOR SPECTRUM SENSING

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FFT is applied to the windowed frame. Note that , are real numbers and the frequency spectrum of , :
1

( ) =
=0

, 2 / (2)

= 0,1, . . 1, = 0,1, 1

is symmetric, thus for each frame only + 1 tones 2 of (), = 0,1, . . 1, = 0, 1, 1, are required. These tones are separated by fs/N Hz. The PSD computation module follows the FFT module. Define , the PSD of , as [5]: = 2 = 0,1, . . , 2 = 0,1, 1 (3) The PSDs of T consecutive frames are used for averaging, yielding: 1 =
1

Fig. 1 shows the flowchart of the FAR algorithm.

,
=0

= 0, 1, . . . ,

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where the factor is not actually required. Let Pm be the mean of calculated across all frequency tones: 2 = + 2
2

scanned. Alternatively, the decision rule can be rewritten as: occupied .

> <

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=0 2

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available Decision results of channel states from multi-tones can be combined to make a joint decision. For instance, if K is a frequency set of interest, a joint decision for frequency tones k K can be formed as:

where, again, the factor can be dropped without +2 affecting performance. In order to be robust to the background noise level, the decision variable is formed as a ratio: () = , = 0,1, . . . . , 2 (6)

, { ( ) } , { < }

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Where denotes AND operation. IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

Finally, thresholding is applied to for k = 0, 1, . . . , ,and the decisions on channel states are made 2 according to the following rule: Occupied > < Available Where is preset thresholds. For every N T samples, + 1tones over afs/2 Hz frequency band are
2

The input signal to the cognitive radio is the random signal in real numbers that is generated using random variables. The input signal to the CR is shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2:Input random signal to CR

The output is a set of vectors that shows the availability of the channelsin each time slotthat can be used for transmission as well as reception of data.

The cognitive radio will change its reception as well as transmission parameters according to the available channels. The available channels are shown in fig. 3.

Fig. 3: Available channels Networks IEEE transactions on wireless communications, vol. 7, no. 4, april 2008. S. Haykin, D. Thomson, and J. Reed, Spectrum sensing for cognitive radio, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 97, no. 5, pp. 849877, May 2009. T. Yucek and H. Arslan, A survey of spectrum sensing algorithms for cognitive radio applications, IEEE Communications Surveys &Tutorials, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 116 130, March 2009. VarakaUdayKanth, Kolli Ravi Chandra ,Rayala Ravi Kumar, Spectrum Sharing In Cognitive Radio Networks,International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4Issue4- April 2013 J. Proakis and D. Manolakis, Digital signal processing: principles, algorithms, and applications, 4th ed. Prentice Hall, 2006.

V.

CONCLUSION [2].

CR is an exciting and promising technology that offers a solution to the spectrum crowding problem.FAR algorithm for spectrum sensing has been proposed and selection for major parameters of FAR algorithm has been discussed. FAR algorithm is designed to compromise between the performance and implementation complexity. In particular, FAR algorithm has a constant threshold feature which is greatly in favour of blind sensing. The advantage of algorithm is that it has got less complexity which is beneficial for less power consumption. REFERENCES [1]. Ying-Chang Liang, YonghongZeng,Edward C.Y. Peh, and Anh Tuan Hoang, SensingThroughput Tradeoff for Cognitive Radio

[3].

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