Cognitive Radio Sensing Information-Theoretic Criteria Based

In this paper¹, we explore the Information-Theoretic Criteria, namely, Akaikes Information Criterion (AIC) and Minimum Description Length (MDL) as a tool to sense vacant sub-band over the spectrum bandwidth. The proposed technique is motivated by the fact that an idle sub-band (Normal process) presents a number of independent eigenvectors appreciably larger than for an occupied sub-band (Non-normal process). It turns out that, based on the number of the independent eigenvectors of a given covariance matrix of the observed signal, one can conclude on the nature of the sensed sub-band. Our-theoretical result as well as the empirical results are first applied on experimental measurement campaign conducted at the Eurécom PLATON Platform. We then apply our method to an IEEE 802.11b Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) signal in order to analyze the robustness of the proposed approach in presence of increased levels of noise. We argue that the proposed sub-space based techniques give interesting results in terms of sensing the white space in the spectrum.