Distributed Cooperative Wideband Spectrum Sensing Algorithm Based on Subspace Methods

We present a novel distributed cooperative spectrum sensing algorithm from compressive sampling in wideband cognitive radio (CR) networks. Each CR utilizes compressive sampling to reduce data acquisition costs. A subspace method is then adopted to directly detect occupied channels without reconstructing the sparse spectrum. To obtain the spatial diversity gain, global signal subspace is estimated by the distributed projection approximation subspace tracking (DPAST) algorithm in which the CRs exchange information locally and cooperate without the need for a fusion center. Then, the orthogonality property of the signal subspace and noise subspace can be exploited to find spectral support to complete the spectrum sensing. We study the convergence behavior of the DPAST algorithm and evaluate the performance of spectrum sensing. Simulation results indicate that the DPAST can effectively estimate the global signal subspace, and the proposed compressed wideband spectrum sensing scheme performs better than spectrum sensing at a single CR.