Wideband Spectrum Sensing and Non-Parametric Signal Classification for Autonomous Self-Learning Cognitive Radios

This paper presents an autonomous cognitive radio (CR) architecture, referred to as the Radiobot. This model goes beyond adaptive radio systems to exploit the main ingredients of cognition which, in this context, are mainly self-learning and self-reconfiguration. Without any prior knowledge of the RF environment, the Radiobot applies a sequence of increasingly sophisticated processing steps to detect and identify the sensed signals. In particular, in this paper, it applies a blind energy detection followed by a cyclostationary detection method to detect the active signals and extract their underlying periodic properties as reflected in cyclic frequencies. These extracted signal features are classified based on the Chinese restaurant process (CRP) and a learning algorithm is applied to achieve autonomous self-reconfiguration of the sensing module. We analyze the impact of fading and Doppler frequency shift on both the energy and cyclostationary detections, and show the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of the carrier frequency detector. We show the robustness of the cyclostationary detection against channel fading and wide-sense stationary noise. Simulation results are presented to verify the multi-band operability and the reconfiguration ability of the Radiobot and to verify the convergence of the proposed learning algorithm.