Wideband Temporal Spectrum Sensing Using Cepstral Features

Spectrum sensing enables secondary users in a cognitive radio network to opportunistically access portions of the spectrum left idle by primary users. Tracking spectrum holes jointly in time and frequency over a wide spectrum band is a challenging task. In one approach to wideband temporal sensing, the spectrum band is partitioned into narrowband subchannels of fixed bandwidth, which are then characterized via hidden Markov modeling using average power or energy measurements as observation data. Adjacent, correlated subchannels are recursively aggregated into channels of variable bandwidths, corresponding to the primary user signals. Thus, wideband temporal sensing is transformed into a multiband sensing scenario by identifying the primary user channels in the spectrum band. However, future changes in the configuration of the primary user channels in the multiband setup cannot generally be detected using an energy detector front end for spectrum sensing. We propose the use of a cepstral feature vector to detect changes in the spectrum envelope of a primary user channel. Our numerical results show that the cepstrum-based spectrum envelope detector performs well under moderate to high signal-to-noise ratio conditions1.