Cooperative spectrum sensing based on convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is an important topic due to its capacity to solve the issue of the hidden terminal. However, the sensing performance of CSS is still poor, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) situations. In this paper, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are considered to extract the features of the observed signal and, as a consequence, improve the sensing performance. More specifically, a novel two-dimensional dataset of the received signal is established and three classical CNN (LeNet, AlexNet and VGG-16)-based CSS schemes are trained and analyzed on the proposed dataset. In addition, sensing performance comparisons are made between the proposed CNN-based CSS schemes and the AND, OR, majority voting-based CSS schemes. The simulation results state that the sensing accuracy of the proposed schemes is greatly improved and the network depth helps with this.