IHCS: Collaborative Research: Compressive Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of this research is to improve design of collaboratively discovering unused spectrum in a revolutionary wireless communication paradigm, the cognitive-radio network, in which cognitive-radio users can detect and share the unused spectrum. The proposed approach is to apply collaborative compressive sensing to increase spectrum sensing bandwidth, speed, and accuracy. Specifically, the cognitive radios, rather than sweeping a set of channels sequentially, will sense linear combinations of the powers of multiple channels and report them to the fusion center, where the occupied channels are recovered using compressive sensing algorithms. Missing and erroneous reports can be exactly recovered by matrix completion since the matrix of all reports has a low-rank. Prior knowledge of channel gains is not required. The system computes more but senses much less and faster, which will be validated by both numerical and USRP2-based simulations. The proposed research is potentially transformative as the novel framework and algorithms will broadly apply to signal sensing involving multiple sensors, modalities, and data sources. This research will have a broader impact on several audiences. The study of the jointly-sparse signal reconstruction will contribute to researchers working in compressive sensing and wireless networks. The hardware implementation will bring fresh ideas to the industrial community. The proposed research will be integrated into the existing combined education/research effort at the University of Houston and Rice University, improve education of under-represented minorities at the two institutions, and expose students to state-of-the-art research in wireless networks and compressive sensing through the NSF sponsored VIGRE program.