A localized cooperative wideband spectrum sensing for dynamic access of TV bands using RF sensor networks

In this paper we address and simulate a Radio Frequency (RF) sensor network for a cooperative spectrum sensing and localization scheme. The proposed method integrates a Wavelet based Multi-Resolution Spectrum Sensing (MRSS), an N-bit hard combination technique for cooperative decision making and a Received Signal Strength (RSS) based localization algorithm to detect the availability of frequency bands and the location of the usable base station. We develop an N-bit hard combination technique and compare its performance to a traditionally used 2-bit hard combination for cooperative sensing. The key idea is to design a novel RF sensor network based cooperative wideband spectrum sensing and localization scheme by using a wavelet based Multi-Resolution Spectrum Sensing (MRSS) and Received Signal Strength (RSS) Localization techniques which were originally proposed for cognitive radio applications. The performance evaluations are also done to show the different detection accuracies for varying parameters such as number of sensor nodes, Signal to Noise Ratios (SNR) and number of averaged Power Spectral Densities (PSD). The proposed scheme improves the problems of shadowing, fading and noise. In addition, the RSS based localization technique was shown to be an acceptable means of estimating the position of the available transmitter.