Compressed Spectrum Sensing for Whitespace Networking

Abstract

We study the problem of wideband compressed spectrum sensing for detection of whitespaces when some prior knowledge about spectrum occupancy is available. Our experiments show that the primary user occupancy of the UHF band at a given location doesn?t vary much with time. Thus, from initial sensing we estimate the support of spectrum occupancy and we use this knowledge in subsequent sensing. We explore two methods in this regard. However, the above methods still require spectrum recovery which has high complexity but since we are interested in only detection, we pose the detection problem directly on the compressed samples (thereby avoiding recovery) assuming i.i.d flat fading between the primary users, and analyse its performance.