Traffic Learning: A Deep Learning Approach for Obtaining Accurate Statistical Information of the Channel Traffic in Spectrum Sharing Systems

In recent works, the statistical information of the channel traffic has been increasingly exploited to make effective decisions in spectrum sharing systems. However, these statistics cannot be obtained perfectly under (realistic) Imperfect Spectrum Sensing (ISS). Therefore, in this work we study comprehensively the approaches in the literature that correct the estimation of the channel traffic statistics under ISS, namely the closed-form expression approach and the algorithmic reconstruction approach. Then, we introduce a novel approach named Traffic Learning as a Deep Learning (DL) approach for providing accurate estimation of the channel traffic statistics under ISS. For this novel approach, deep neural networks using Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models are found for the estimation of several statistical metrics. In addition, we show that utilising effective features from spectrum sensing observations can lead to a considerable improvement in statistics estimation for each, mean, variance, minimum and distribution of the channel traffic under ISS, outperforming the existing approaches in the literature, which are based on either closed-form expressions or reconstruction algorithms.