Application of Compressed Sampling for Spectrum Sensing and Channel Estimation in Wideband Cognitive Radio Networks

In the last few years Compressed Sampling (CS) has been well used in the area of signal processing and image compression. Recently, CS has been earning a great interest in the area of wireless communication networks. CS exploits the sparsity of the signal processed for digital acquisition to reduce the number of measurement, which leads to reductions in the size, power consumption, processing time and processing cost. This article presents application of CS for the spectrum sensing and channel estimation in Cognitive Radio (CR) networks. Basic approach of CS is introduced first, and then scheme for spectrum sensing and channel estimation for CR is discussed. First, fast and efficient compressed spectrum sensing (CSS) scheme is proposed to detect wideband spectrum, where samples are taken at sub-Nyquist rate and signal acquisition is terminated automatically once the samples are sufficient for the best spectral recovery and then, after the spectrum sensing, in the second phase notion of multipath sparsity is formalized and a novel approach based on Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) is discussed to estimate sparse multipath channels for CR networks. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through comparisons with the existing conventional spectrum sensing and channel estimation methods.