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Transactions on Mobile Computing
2
presence of uncertainty, high noise, interference, outliers, and
channel fading.
Complementary to existing efforts on wide-band
spectrum sensing, in this paper, we focus on the efficient
scheduling of sensing, in a timely and cost-effective fashion, to
detect spectrum usage activities in the presence of uncertain
PU activity patterns and varying channel conditions. The
major contributions of our work are as follows:
• We propose a novel wideband sensing scheduling
scheme, sequential compressed spectrum sensing. It in-
corporates the compressed sensing technique into the
sequential periodic sensing framework to take advan-
tage of both for accurate and low-overhead spectrum
sensing. Specifically, we perform sequential analy-
sis [9] based on sub-Nyquist samples directly without
incurring excessive CS recovery overhead, and exploit
the sequential detection to improve the sensing perfor-
mance.
• We investigate a two-stage change-point detection
method to quickly and efficiently determine the
change in channel usage. In the first stage, sequential
sensing is performed to detect the potential change in
spectrum occupancy, and in the second stage, inten-
sive in-depth wideband sensing is triggered to make
final decisions rapidly on the wideband spectral usage
conditions.
• We propose a CS recovery algorithm that exploits
the block feature of wideband spectrum to further
improve the CS reconstruction performance for more
accurate determination of wideband power spectrum
usage.
• We perform extensive simulations to validate and
demonstrate the major advantages of our design.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. After
briefly reviewing related work in Sec. 2, we describe the
system model in Sec. 3. Sequential wideband sensing based
on compressed sensing is presented in Sec. 4 followed by
Sec. 5 where change-point detection and in-depth sensing
scheduling are introduced. Section 6 presents our block-
sparse recovery algorithm and integrated framework. In
Sec. 7, we present and analyze the simulation results. The
paper concludes in Sec. 8.
2 RELATED WORK
The majority of work on spectrum sensing considers the
detection quality for one-time sensing. However, in a long-
term perspective, the presence of uncertainty, such as high
noise, interference, channel fading and anomalies, makes it
a daunting task to perform accurate detection solely at one
time. Some recent efforts attempt to make the detection for
narrow frequency channels based on a sequence of sensing
data. Specifically, sequential analysis [9] has been applied
in spectrum sensing to attain a better performance such as
shorter latency and more precise decision. In Kim et al. in [10]
and Min et al. in [11], the time is divided into frames. Each
frame contains a number of sensing blocks, and a decision
is made only based on blocks of samples within each frame.
Without sensing in the remaining time of the frame after a
decision, these schemes are subject to a significant detection
delay upon the returning of the legacy users. Guo et al. in
[12] proposed a backward sequential probability ratio test
which combines the observations from the past several sen-
sing blocks to improve the sensing performance. Rather than
fixing the period between sensing blocks without scheduling,
a fundamental difference between our work and [10], [11],
[12] is that we adaptively schedule sensing over time to speed
up the decision while not introducing a high overhead. In
[7], [8], the authors show that scheduling periodic sequential
sensing helps to improve the spectrum sensing performance.
However, it would be very expensive to perform compressed
sensing periodically. Some studies, such as [13] and [14],
have taken into account the change detection for cognitive ra-
dios. However, the studies of change detection and sequential
spectrum sensing are often decoupled, while there is a need
and unique opportunity to put the two together.
Different from existing efforts, one focus of this paper is
on effective detection of the activities of legacy wireless sys-
tems over a wide spectrum band through smart scheduling of
wide-band sensing. The sequential detection is only applied
over sparse samples of signals (rather than Nyquist samples)
to facilitate low cost coarse signal monitoring, before we de-
termine the actual sub-band occupied by the primary signals.
We also propose a scheme to efficiently detect the change of
wide spectrum band, where the schedule of the sequential
detection is also adapted to speed up the detection of change.
In multiband joint detection [15], primary signals are
jointly detected over multiple sub-bands rather than over one
large band at a time, where a set of frequency dependent
detection thresholds are optimized to achieve the best trade-
off between aggregate measures of opportunistic throughput
and interference to PUs. As each SU senses the sub-bands
one by one, it will incur a long detection delay when the
number of sub-bands is large. In addition, the work focuses
on the cooperation among SUs in sensing sub-bands. Our
work allows an SU to directly sense a wide-band in a long
term at low overhead.
Alternatively, compressed sensing (CS) is a useful tool for
wideband spectrum sensing and analysis. Tian et al. [5] deve-
loped CS techniques tailored for coarse sensing of wideband
to identify spectrum holes, where sub-Nyquist samples are
used along with a wavelet-based edge detector. Similarly, in
[16], [17], [18], various wideband spectrum sensing schemes
based on CS are proposed. Sun et al. [6] proposed a multi-
slot wideband sensing algorithm with CS and developed
algorithms to reconstruct the wideband spectrum from the
compressed samples, where the sensing is terminated once
the current spectral recovery is satisfactory. In [19], the
authors propose algorithms for wideband spectrum sensing
based on flexible channel division scheme and compressed
sensing, and the authors in [20] make an effort to reduce
the computational complexity of compressed sensing with
the information from geo-location database. Romero et al.
in [21] propose to exploit the second-order statistics such as
covariance to improve the compressed sensing performances.
There are also some research efforts for cooperative wide-
band sensing [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] with the sensing from
multiple users. For example, the algorithm in [24] improves
the detection performance and reduces the computational
overhead by exploiting the joint sparse properties of wide-
band signals among multiple SUs.
Although these aforementioned methods show it is pro-