Energy efficiency of compressed spectrum sensing in wideband cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks, wideband spectrum sensing (WSS) has been advocated as an effective approach to increase the spectrum access opportunity of the secondary users. On the other hand, because of the increase of sampling rate and sensing time duration cost by the analog-to-digital converter (ADC), energy saving has been a significant problem for WSS. In this paper, taking advantage of the frequency-domain sparsity of the wideband spectrum, a WSS scheme combining compressed sensing and multi-band joint detection technique is proposed to reduce the energy consumption. Based on extensive analysis and simulation, we identify the sparsity order of the wideband spectrum, the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the primary signal, and the compression rate employed in sampling as three key factors that affect the sensing performance. In particular, we derive a closed-form analytical model of the scheme. Based on these observations, the energy efficiency, defined as the ratio of the spectrum access opportunity to the energy consumption, is maximized through the optimization process of the compression rate under the sensing performance constraints. We also indicate the uniqueness of the optimal compression rate for maximizing the energy efficiency. Numerical and simulation results show that our proposed scheme is more energy efficient if the wideband spectrum is sparser in the frequency domain.