| To meet the ever increasing spectrum demand, developing a mechanism for dynamic spectrum access seems inevitable. Spectrum sensing enables cognitive radios (CRs) to identify and use frequency bands (channels) that are not being used by primary users (PUs) at a particular place and time. However, sensing errors and limited sensing resources, such as sensing hardware and sensing time, introduce significant technical challenges to the development of such an ideal capability. Adaptive sensing strategies allow the sensing resources to be spent on more promising primary channels. This is achieved by exploiting past sensing outcomes of one secondary user (SU), or, as proposed in this research, multiple spatially distributed SUs. We propose adaptive sensing strategies for three different scenarios. First, we assume that a SU sequentially senses a number of primary channels to find the first available channel. We propose a two-stage spectrum detection strategy that allows the spectrum detector to quickly detect and skip though most of busy channels and spend most of its time on channels that are more likely to be idle. Second, we consider the case where multiple SUs jointly try to locate idle channels within a given sensing time, which itself is divided into a number of sensing slots. We propose a cooperative spectrum search strategy that specifies the channel to be sensed by each SU in each slot in such a way to maximize the expected number of identified idle channels. Third, we consider a primary network that operates in a synchronous time-framed fashion. We assume that the occupancy state of each primary channel over different time frames follows a discrete-time Markov process. We propose a cooperative sensing strategy that decides which channel should be sensed by which SU in each frame. The goal is to maximize a utility function that accounts for both the number of detected idle channel-frames and the number of miss-detected busy channel-frames. We present analytical and numerical results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed sensing strategies in increasing identified time-frequency spectrum opportunities and/or reducing interference with licensed systems. |
