WiVCoRA: Wigner–Ville Cognitive Radio Access for Secondary Nodes

Cognitive radio (CR) is currently one of the most promising solutions for designing spectrum-efficient wireless communication systems. In this paper, we present a greedy cognitive access policy that handles spectrum sensing with the tools of image processing. By means of the Wigner-Ville transform (WVT), we are able to analyze the time and frequency features of the received interference, and represent them on a time-frequency grid as an image in which brightness reveals the spectrum occupancy. According to sensed interference, each secondary user autonomously tries to access the grid following a multiple-division principle, i.e., by properly shaping the signal in the code, time, and frequency domains. In detail, this is realized by processing the WVT to derive the shaping mask (and the matching algorithm) that allows the filling up of the “time spectrum holes.” Numerical simulations and a test-bed implementation show how the proposed scheme outperforms selected state-of-the-art approaches while still presenting an affordable computational cost.