Entropic Analysis of Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio

The rapid proliferation of wireless communications has brought many exciting new technologies that require ever more spectrum. A recent FCC study noted that spectrum utilization exhibits large geospatial and temporal variances. As the number of wireless devices requiring spectrum access will undoubtedly increase, much effort has gone into exploiting the results from this study. The current strategy is to allow secondary user unobtrusive access to a channel exhibiting negligible primary user activity. Cognitive radio is expected to be the key enabling technology for increased spectrum utilization. As primary user activity is not spatially localized, a collaborative measure amongst multiple cognitive radio nodes has been suggested as a more accurate model of activity. The only caveat being the loss of spectrum required of a control channel is believed to be directly proportional to the accuracy of spectrum sensing. This proposal aims to enable research investigating this dependence via a statistical entropic measurement.