Measurement campaign for collaborative sensing using cyclostationary based mobile sensors

Spectrum sensing is a key component for obtaining spectrum awareness required for dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks. It helps in finding spectrum opportunities for the secondary user (SU) while managing the interference to the primary user (PU). The performance of single-user sensing degrades in the presence of multipath fading and shadowing. Cooperative sensing can overcome this issue by providing diversity gains. There are also added benefits of performance improvement and simpler detectors. Although there is lot of literature on cooperative sensing, there is still lack of measurement campaigns verifying the cooperative gains in practical scenarios using mobile sensors. In this paper, the gain of using cooperative sensing is evaluated based on the large-scale measurement campaign carried out in Helsinki, Finland using six cyclostationary based mobile sensors measuring over 100 locations. The measurements are carried out for 16 DVB-T channels with bandwidth of 8 MHz each. Fusion rules such as OR, AND, MAJORITY, and SUM (of cyclostationary based local test statistics) are employed and their performances compared to a cyclostationary based local detector. The results demonstrate the gains obtained by cooperative sensing based on the real-world field measurements using mobile sensors.