Fast automatic link establishment: A new metric and the value of spectrum prediction

Automatic link establishment (ALE) is one of the important technologies in HF communication. One of the indicators to measure the performance of an ALE system is the linking time, which includes channel switching, spectrum sensing, and trying to call three periods. Asynchronous mode has been widely used for its simple operation. When establishing an link, the station sorts all the channels and selects the best available channel based on link quality analysis (LQA) matrix, which consists of scores of channels. The traditional LQA algorithm only considers a single factor, such as SNR. In this paper, a new LQA matrix combined with spectrum prediction is proposed to reduce the linking time. It is a new metric to evaluate channels. Spectrum prediction technology has been developed in order to solve the problem of time and energy consumption of spectrum sensing. Based on previous occupancy information, the statistical state parameters of each channel can be obtained. Compared with the traditional algorithm, the new algorithm balances channel state and quality parameters with multiplicative relation. The simulation results show that the linking time is reduced and the performance is improved using new algorithm, and the spectrum prediction can further reduce linking time.