Joint Spatial-Temporal Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Networks

In a wireless system with opportunistic spectrum sharing, secondary users equipped with cognitive radios attempt to access radio spectrum that is not being used by the primary licensed users. On a given frequency channel, a secondary user can perform spectrum sensing to determine spatial or temporal opportunities for spectrum reuse. Whereas most prior works address either spatial or temporal sensing in isolation, we propose a joint spatial-temporal spectrum sensing scheme, which exploits information from spatial sensing to improve the performance of temporal sensing. Our simulation results show that the proposed joint spatial-temporal approach significantly outperforms existing temporal sensing schemes.