Energy-Based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing of SC-FDMA Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a frequency-hopping M-ary frequency-shift keying spectrum sensing network (FH/MFSK SSN) for identifying the on/off states of the users supported by a single-carrier frequency-division multiple assess (SC-FDMA) primary radio (PR) system. Specifically, the spectrums of an uplink interleaved frequency-division multiple access (IFDMA) PR system are monitored by a number of cognitive radio sensing nodes (CRSNs). These CRSNs distributedly detect the on/off states of users based on one of the three energy detection schemes. After the local spectrum sensing, the CRSNs transmit their detected states to a fusion centre (FC) with the aid of FH/MFSK techniques. At the FC, the on/off states of the users supported the IFDMA PR system are finally classified according to either the conventional equal-gain combining (EGC) scheme or the novel erasure-supported EGC (ES-EGC) scheme. In this way, the on/off information about the spectrums occupied by an IFDMA PR system can be obtained, so that they can be exploited by a cognitive radio (CR) system. For local spectrum sensing, in this paper, we consider four synchronisation scenarios concerning the synchronisation between the received IFDMA signals and the CRSNs. The performance of the FH/MFSK SSN associated with various schemes is investigated by simulations. Our studies show that the FH/MFSK SSN constitutes one of the highly reliable spectrum sensing schemes, which are capable of exploiting both the space diversity provided by local CRSNs and the frequency diversity provided by the subcarriers of IFDMA system. Received on 17 October 2013; accepted on 31 March 2013; published on 14 July 2014