Spectrum Sensing Based On Deep Learning To Increase Spectrum Utilization

Abstract

This paper proposes a new spectrum sensing technique for cognitive radio systems. To determine vacancy of the spectrum, the proposed method employs the recurrent neural network (RNN), one of the popular deep learning techniques. The proposed technique determines the spectrum occupancy of the primary user (PU) by observing the received signal’s energy and any information on the PU signal characteristic is not used. To this end, the received signal’s spectrum is obtained by fast Fourier transform (FFT). This process is performed on consecutive received signals and the resulting spectrums are stacked. Finally, a 2-dimensional spectrum (or spectrogram) is made. This 2-D spectrum is cut into sensing channel bandwidths and inputted to the deep learning model to decide the channel’s occupancy. While the recently published spectrum sensing technique based on convolutional neural network (CNN) relies on an empty channel, the proposed technique does not require any empty channel. Only the channel signal of interest to sense is needed. Since spectrum sensing results is two (busy or idle), binary classification deep learning model is developed. According to the computer simulation results, the proposed method has similar performance with the conventional CNN-based method while the spectral efficiency of the proposed method is much higher than that of the existing scheme. In addition, the overall learnable parameters of the proposed deep learning model is only 2/3 of the existing method