Distributed Compressive Spectrum Sensing in Cooperative Multihop Cognitive Networks

In wideband cognitive radio (CR) networks, spectrum sensing is an essential task for enabling dynamic spectrum sharing, but entails several major technical challenges: very high sampling rates required for wideband processing, limited power and computing resources per CR, frequency-selective wireless fading, and interference due to signal leakage from other coexisting CRs. In this paper, a cooperative approach to wideband spectrum sensing is developed to overcome these challenges. To effectively reduce the data acquisition costs, a compressive sampling mechanism is utilized which exploits the signal sparsity induced by network spectrum under-utilization. To collect spatial diversity against wireless fading, multiple CRs collaborate during the sensing task by enforcing consensus among local spectral estimates; accordingly, a decentralized consensus optimization algorithm is derived to attain high sensing performance at a reasonable computational cost and power overhead. To identify spurious spectral estimates due to interfering CRs, the orthogonality between the spectrum of primary users and that of CRs is imposed as constraints for consensus optimization during distributed collaborative sensing. These decentralized techniques are developed for both cases of with and without channel knowledge. Simulations testify the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative sensing approach in multi-hop CR networks.