Title: Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio sensor networks: towards ultra low overhead, distributed channel findings

Authors: Fei Hu, Rahul Patibandla, Yang Xiao

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623, USA. ' Department of Computer Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, 101 Houser Hall, Box 870290, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290, USA

Abstract: Cognitive radios can utilise the idle spectrum holes that are not occupied by the Primary Users (PUs) (i.e. licensed users) for temporary wireless communication tasks. A challenging issue is to efficiently reach global/regional views among the Secondary Users (SUs) on channel availability. The SUs need to exchange control messages on their spectrum sensing results. A traditional way is to send out |raw| channel information from each individual node. It consumes much wireless communication bandwidth. This research proposes a new cognitive radio spectrum sensing scheme based on our proposed Spatially-Decaying, Time-Incremental (SDTI) updating algorithm. Our SDTI algorithm is based on the extension of Gossiping Updates for Efficient Spectrum Sensing (GUESS) scheme that adopts Flajolet-Martin (FM) aggregation to reduce data amount. Our SDTI automatically assigns weights to channel information based on the distance between a source node and an observing node. Further, distance nodes have less important information to the observing node.

Keywords: cognitive radios; collaborative spectrum sensing; CSS; Flajolet-Martin aggregation; sensor networks; ad hoc networks; secondary users.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2008.017231

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2008 Vol.3 No.2, pp.115 - 122

Published online: 19 Feb 2008 *

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