Network-Wide Spectrum Situation Reconstruction Using Total Variation Inpainting in Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, the problem of spectrum situation reconstruction is considered for large cognitive radio ad hoc networks. The major challenge of such problem lies in the fact that only very limited measurements of spectrum occupancy may be obtained by the cognitive users for a certain location at any given time slot. This is due to both the hardware limitations as well as the tradeoff between spectrum sensing and data throughput of the cognitive users. By representing the spectrum sensing results across the network as an image, we formulate the problem of spectrum situation reconstruction as an image recovery problem. The method of total variation inpainting is applied to solve the problem with low recovery error. The proposed method takes advantage of the correlations in multiple dimensions and the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.