Radio Environment Map Construction Based on Spatial Statistics and Bayesian Hierarchical Model

Constructing an infrastructure for spectrum sensing and spectrum sharing on the cloud is a promising technology. In this paper, we propose an analysis framework based on spectrum data gathered by distributed sensors to construct the radio environment map (REM). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to leverage the power of Bayesian analysis and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in REM. Specifically, a three-stage Bayesian hierarchical model (BHM) is established to imitate the spectrum data generation process under spatially correlated shadow fading. Parameters of BHM are estimated with the MCMC algorithm from data collected by the sensor network. Then, we address the space-dimension spectrum inference problem with the aim to interpolate the signal strength where there is no sensor node by composition sampling. At each point in the area of interest, the posterior predictive distribution of the receive signal strength can be obtained by kernel density smoother. We make spatial inference under two sensor location modes (square lattice located sensors and randomly located sensors) and two scenarios (with and without the information about the signal source), respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that although the randomly located sensors mode is suitable for parameter estimation, the inference performance is not better than the square lattice located sensors mode. Quantitative analysis of the inference performance confirms that the effectiveness of our data analysis framework is compelling.