Compressed Sensing for Wideband Cognitive Radios

In the emerging paradigm of open spectrum access, cognitive radios dynamically sense the radio-spectrum environment and must rapidly tune their transmitter parameters to efficiently utilize the available spectrum. The unprecedented radio agility envisioned, calls for fast and accurate spectrum sensing over a wide bandwidth, which challenges traditional spectral estimation methods typically operating at or above Nyquist rates. Capitalizing on the sparseness of the signal spectrum in open-access networks, this paper develops compressed sensing techniques tailored for the coarse sensing task of spectrum hole identification. Sub-Nyquist rate samples are utilized to detect and classify frequency bands via a wavelet-based edge detector. Because spectrum location estimation takes priority over fine-scale signal reconstruction, the proposed novel sensing algorithms are robust to noise and can afford reduced sampling rates.