Opportunistic Spectrum Access of Sparse Wideband in Stand-Alone and Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

Opportunistic spectrum access in wideband regime requires higher processing capabilities of digital radio front ends. An emerging signal processing approach termed compressive sensing enables estimation of the sparse wideband exploiting very few compressive measurements, thus employs relief of high-speed signal processing units. This letter proposes a novel scheme of wideband sensing for cognitive radio where sensing performance is increased with signal sparsity levels. Detection performance is again improved introducing cooperation among the radio nodes which applies well known fusion rules. Numerical simulations of the detection performance are provided for both the stand-alone and cooperative schemes.