Detection of traffic patterns in the radio spectrum for cognitive wireless network management

Dynamic Spectrum Access allows using the spectrum opportunistically by identifying wireless technologies sharing the same medium. However, detecting a given technology is, most of the time, not enough to increase spectrum efficiency and mitigate coexistence problems due to radio interference. As a solution, recognizing traffic patterns may lead to select the best time to access the shared spectrum optimally. To this extent, we present a traffic recognition approach that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first non-intrusive method to detect traffic patterns directly from the radio spectrum, contrary to traditional packet-based analysis methods. In particular, we designed a Deep Learning (DL) architecture that differentiates between Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic, burst traffic with different duty cycles, and traffic with varying rates of transmission. As input to these models, we explore the use of images representing the spectrum in time and time-frequency. Furthermore, we present a novel data randomization approach to generate realistic synthetic data that combines two state-of-the-art simulators. Finally, we show that after training and testing our models in the generated dataset, we achieve an accuracy of ≥ 96 % and outperform state-of-the-art methods based on IP-packets with DL.