A cognitive radio will have to sense and discover the spectral environments where it would not cause primary radios to interfere. Because the primary radios have the right to use the frequency, the cognitive radios as the secondary radios must detect radio signals before use. However, the secondary radios also need identifying the primary and other secondary radios where the primary radios are vulnerable to interference. In this paper, a method of simultaneously identifying signals of primary and secondary radios is proposed. The proposed bandwidth differentiation assumes the primary and secondary radios use orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and the secondary radios use at the lower number of subcarriers than the primary radios. The false alarm and detection probabilities are analytically evaluated using the characteristic function method. Numerical evaluations are also conducted on the assumption the primary radio is digital terrestrial television broadcasting. Result showed the proposed method could achieve the false alarm probability of 0.1 and the detection probability of 0.9 where the primary and secondary radio powers were 2.5 dB and 3.6 dB higher than the noise power. In the evaluation, the reception signals were averaged over the successive 32 snapshots, and the both the primary and secondary radios used QPSK. The power ratios were 4.7 dB and 8.4 dB where both the primary and secondary radios used 64QAM.

This paper proposes a concept for a new technical field called wireless distributed network (WDN) as a strategic technical field to enable flexible networking and radio resource management (RRM) to cope with dynamic variation of spatially distributed traffic demands. As the core technical subject areas for the WDN, this paper identifies distributed networking for flexible network creation, cooperative transmission and reception for flexible link creation, and dynamic spectrum access for flexible radio resource management, and explains their technical features and challenges for constructing the WDN. This paper also discusses some already being studied application fields as well as potential future directions of the WDN applications.

This paper addresses the coexistence issue of distributed heterogeneous networks where the network nodes are cognitive radio terminals. These nodes, operating as secondary users (SUs), might interfere with primary users (PUs) who are licensed to use a given frequency band. Further, due to the lack of coordination and the dissimilarity of the radio access technologies (RATs) among these wireless nodes, they might interfere with each other. To solve this coexistence problem, we propose an architecture that enables coordination among the distributed nodes. The architecture provides coexistence solutions and sends reconfiguration commands to SU networks. As an example, time sharing is considered as a solution. Further, the time slot allocation ratios and transmit powers are parameters encapsulated in the reconfiguration commands. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of the coexistence between PUs and SUs, as well as the coexistence among SUs. The former addresses the interference from SUs to PUs, whereas the latter addresses the sharing of an identified spectrum opportunity among heterogeneous SU networks for achieving an efficient spectrum usage. In this study, we first introduce a new parameter named as quality of coexistence (QoC), which is defined as the ratio between the quality of SU transmissions and the negative interference to PUs. In this study we assume that the SUs have multiple antennas and employ fixed transmit power control (fixed-TPC). By using the approximation to the distribution of a weighted sum of chi-square random variables (RVs), we develop an analytical model for the time slot allocation among SU networks. Using this analytical model, we obtain the optimal time slot allocation ratios as well as transmit powers of the SU networks by maximizing the QoC. This leads to an efficient spectrum usage among SUs and a minimized negative influence to the PUs. Results show that in a particular scenario the QoC can be increased by 30%.

A Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel (GMBC) models the MIMO transmission of Gaussian signals from a transmitter to one or more receivers. Its capacity region and different precoding schemes for it have been well investigated, especially for the case wherein there are only transmit power constraints. In this paper, a special case of GMBC is investigated, wherein receive power constraints are also included. By imposing receive power constraints, the model, called protected GMBC (PGMBC), can be applied to certain scenarios in spatial spectrum sharing, secretive communications, mesh networks and base station cooperation. The sum capacity, capacity region, and application examples for the PGMBC are discussed in this paper. Sub-optimum precoding algorithms are also proposed for the PGMBC, where standard user precoding techniques are performed over a BC with a modified channel, which we refer to as the "protection-implied BC." In the protection-implied BC, the receiver protection constraints have been implied in the channel, which means that by satisfying the transmit power constraints on the protection implied channel, receiver protection constraints are guaranteed to be met. Any standard single-user or multi-user MIMO precoding scheme may then be performed on the protection-implied channel. When SINR-matching duality-based precoding is applied on the protection-implied channel, sum-capacity under full protection constraints (zero receive power), and near-sum-capacity under partial protection constraints (limited non-zero receive power) are achieved, and were verified by simulations.

We propose an opportunistic spectrum access scheme for unslotted secondary users exploiting spectrum opportunities in unslotted primary networks. An analytical model is developed to investigate the performance of the proposed scheme, and numerical results are presented to evaluate the performance in unslotted primary networks.

In the symbiotic cognitive radio (CR) networks, the CR users (CUs) may assist the primary transmission in a cooperation time, and obtain an incentive time for their own data transmission. In this letter, we study the throughput maximization problem in the symbiotic CR networks. Under the symbiosis and transmit power constraints, we aim to find the optimal cooperation time to assist the primary transmission and power allocations among the CUs. Given the cooperation time, the optimal power allocations can be solved by multi-level water-filling (MWF) with individual volume limits. A theoretical analysis is presented on the cooperation time and a modified bisection algorithm with low complexity is proposed to find the sub-optimal cooperation time. Simulation results show that the spectrum usage efficiency can be significantly improved as the number of CUs increases.

In a conventional downlink OFDMA system, an underlay secondary network is co-located to formulate a new implementation of OFDMA-based cognitive radio (OCR), where spectrum sharing is enabled between primary users and secondary users. With the introduced concept of accessible interference temperature, this new model can be easily implemented and may contribute to the future realization of OCR systems.

Cognitive radio has emerged as an efficient approach to reusing the licensed spectrums. How to appropriately set parameters of secondary user (SU) plays a rather important role in constructing cognitive radio networks. In this letter, we have analyzed the theoretical value of SUs' density, which provides a standard for controlling the number of SUs around one primary receiver, in order to guarantee that primary communication links do not experience excessive interference. The simulation result of secondary density well matches with the theoretical result derived from our analysis. Additionally, the achievable rate of secondary user under density control is also analyzed and simulated.

Dynamic spectrum access has become a focal issue recently, in which identifying the available spectrum plays a rather important role. Lots of work has been done concerning secondary user (SU) synchronously accessing primary user's (PU's) network. However, on one hand, SU may have no idea about PU's communication protocols; on the other, it is possible that communications among PU are not based on synchronous scheme at all. In order to address such problems, this paper advances a strategy for SU to search available spectrums with asynchronous MAC-layer sensing. With this method, SUs need not know the communication mechanisms in PU's network when dynamically accessing. We will focus on four aspects: 1) strategy for searching available channels; 2) vacating strategy when PUs come back; 3) estimation of channel parameters; 4) impact of SUs' interference on PU's data rate. The simulations show that our search strategy not only can achieve nearly 50% less interference probability than equal allocation of total search time, but also well adapts to time-varying channels. Moreover, access by our strategies can attain 150% more access time than random access. The moment matching estimator shows good performance in estimating and tracing time-varying channels.

Cooperation is an attractive approach to improving the spectrum sensing performance of cognitive systems experiencing deep shadowing and fading. In this letter, an efficient weight-based cooperative spectrum sensing scheme is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has better accuracy than "AND," "OR," and "half-voting" combination schemes and has similar spectrum sensing accuracy but with lower computational and communication complexity in comparison to the "optimal data fusion" rule.

Free probability theory, which has become a main branch of random matrix theory, is a valuable tool for describing the asymptotic behavior of multiple systems, especially for large matrices. In this paper, using asymptotic free probability theory, a new cooperative scheme for spectrum sensing is proposed, which shows how the asymptotic free behavior of random matrices and the property of Wishart distribution can be used to assist spectrum sensing for cognitive radio. Simulations over Rayleigh fading and AWGN channels demonstrate the proposed scheme has better detection performance than the energy detection techniques and the Maximum-minimum eigenvalue (MME) scheme even for the case of a small sample of observations.

Transmission power control (TPC) is an important aspects of underlay transmission in the cognitive radio (CR) networks since it is able to avoid the extra interference from secondary transmission which can let the CR user coexist with the primary systems around. However, due to the different coverage of the primary signal and CR signal, combined with the complexity of the wireless communication, the scanning CR transmitter may not detect the existence of the primary systems. It will cause inaccurate TPC which will severely disrupt the primary service. In this letter, we propose a dynamic neighbor coordinated power control scheme that can avoid the misdetection of the primary signal and provide relatively accurate TPC related distance estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme greatly reduces interference to the primary systems while enhancing overall CR network throughput.

In this letter, we propose a Throughput-aimed MAC Protocol with Quality of Service (QoS) provision (T-MAC) for cognitive Ad Hoc networks. This protocol operates based on the Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) slot assignments and the power control mechanism, which can improve the QoS provision and network throughput. Our simulation results show that the T-MAC protocol can efficiently increase the network throughput and reduce the access delay.

This position paper outlines the author's view on architectural directions and key technology enablers for the future mobile Internet. It is pointed out that mobile and wireless services will dominate Internet usage in the near future, and it is therefore important to design next-generation network protocols with features suitable for efficiently serving emerging wireless scenarios and applications. Several key requirements for mobile/wireless scenarios are identified - these include new capabilities such as dynamic spectrum coordination, cross-layer support, disconnection tolerant routing, content addressing, and location awareness. Specific examples of enabling technologies which address some of these requirements are given from ongoing research projects at WINLAB. Topics covered briefly include wireless network virtualization, the cache-and-forward (CNF) protocol, geographic (GEO) protocol stack, cognitive radio protocols, and open networking testbeds.

This paper investigates dynamic spectrum access based on MAC-Layer spectrum sensing and prior channel pre-allocation strategy. We first combine channel utilization with channel state transition probability from idle to busy to reflect the channel opportunity quality in cognitive radio systems. Then a MAC-Layer spectrum sensing algorithm based on Channel Opportunity Quality Descending Order (COQDO) is proposed for the single secondary user scenario, so that the single secondary user can be provided with dynamic spectrum access. For the multi-secondary users scenario, in order to solve the channel collision problem among secondary users in dynamic spectrum access, a joint MAC-Layer spectrum sensing and prior channel pre-allocation algorithm is proposed and analyzed. Channel collision problem occurs when more than one secondary users detect the channel as idle and access it at the same time. Furthermore, the prior channel pre-allocation is optimized by using the conventional Color Sensitive Graph Coloring (CSGC) algorithm. Extensive simulation results are presented to compare our proposed algorithms with existing algorithms in terms of idle channel search delay and accumulated channel handoff delay.

Based on Free Probability Theory (FPT), which has become an important branch of Random Matrix Theory (RMT), a new scheme of frequency band sensing for Cognitive Radio (CR) in Direct-Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access (DS-CDMA) multiuser network is proposed. Unlike previous studies in the field, the new scheme does not require the knowledge of the spreading sequences of users and is related to the behavior of the asymptotic free behavior of random matrices. Simulation results show that the asymptotic claims hold true even for a small number of observations (which makes it convenient for time-varying topologies) outperforming classical energy detection scheme and another scheme based on random matrix theory.

In this letter, the performance improvement by the deployment of multiple antennas in cognitive radio systems is studied from a system-level view. The term opportunistic spectrum efficiency (OSE) is defined as the performance metric to evaluate the spectrum opportunities that can actually be exploited by the secondary user (SU). By applying a simple energy combining detector, we show that deploying multiple antennas at the SU transceiver can improve the maximum achievable OSE significantly. Numerical results also reveal that the improvement comes from the reduction of both the detection overhead and the false alarm probability.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for gathering sensing information by using an orthogonal narrowband signal for cooperative sensing in cognitive radio. It is desirable to improve the spectrum sensing performance by countering the locality effect of a wireless channel; cooperative sensing by using multiple inputs of sensing information from the surrounding sensing nodes has attracted attention. Cooperative sensing requires that sensing information be gathered at the master node for determining the existence of a primary signal. If the used information gathering method leads to redundancies, the total capacity of the secondary networks is not improved. In this paper, we propose a novel method for gathering sensing information that maps the sensing information to the orthogonal narrowband signal to achieve simultaneous sensing information gathering at the master node. In this method, the sensing information is mapped to an orthogonal subcarrier signal of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) structure to reduce the frequency resource required for sensing information gathering. The orthogonal signals are transmitted simultaneously from multiple sensing nodes. This paper evaluates the performance of the proposed information gathering method and confirms its effectiveness.

Due to the advancement of software radio and RF technology, cognitive radio(CR) has become an enabling technology to realize dynamic spectrum access through its spectrum sensing and reconfiguration capability. Robust and reliable spectrum sensing is a key factor to discover spectrum opportunity. Single cognitive radios often fail to provide such reliable information because of their inherent sensitivity limitation. Primary signals that are subject to detection by cognitive radios may become weak due to several factors such as fading and shadowing. One approach to overcome this problem is to perform spectrum sensing by using multiple CRs or multiple spectrum sensors. This approach is known as distributed sensing because sensing is carried out through cooperation of spatially distributed sensors. In distributed sensing, sensors should perform spectrum sensing and forward the result to a destination where data fusion is carried out. Depending on the channel conditions between sensors (sensor-to-sensor channel) and between the sensor and the radio (user-channel), we explore different spectrum sensing algorithms where sensors provide the sensing information either cooperatively or independently. Moreover we investigate sensing schemes based on soft information combining (SC), hard information combining (HC). Finally we propose a two-stage detection scheme that uses both SC and HC. The newly proposed detection scheme is shown to provide improved performance compared to sensing based on either HC or SC alone. Computer simulation results are provided to illustrate the performances of the different sensing algorithms.

To realize dynamic spectrum access (DSA), spectrum sensing is performed to detect the presence or absence of primary users (PUs). This paper proposes a sensing architecture. This architecture enables use cases such as DSA with PU detection using a single spectrum sensor and DSA with distributed sensing, such as cooperative sensing, collaborative sensing, and selective sensing. In this paper we focus on distributed sensing. These sensing schemes employ distributed spectrum sensors (DSSs) where each sensor uses energy detection (ED) in Rayleigh fading environment. To theoretically analyze the performance of the three sensing schemes, a closed-form expression for the probability of detection by ED with selective combining (SC) in Rayleigh fading environment is derived. Applying this expression to the PU detection problem, we obtain analytical models of the three sensing schemes. Analysis shows that at 5-dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and with a false alarm rate of 0.004, the probability of detection is increased from 0.02 to 0.3 and 0.4, respectively, by cooperative sensing and collaborative sensing schemes using using three DSSs. Results also show that the selected sensing scheme matches the performance of the collaborative sensing scheme. Moreover, it provides a low false alarm rate.