Efficient Spectrum Availability Information Recovery for Wideband DSA Networks: A Weighted Compressive Sampling Approach

Compressive sampling has great potential for making wideband spectrum sensing possible at sub-Nyquist sampling rates. As a result, there have recently been research efforts that leverage compressive sampling to enable efficient wideband spectrum sensing. These efforts consider homogenous wideband spectrum, where all bands are assumed to have similar PU traffic characteristics. In practice, however, wideband spectrum is not homogeneous, in that different spectrum bands could present different PU occupancy patterns. In fact, the nature of spectrum assignment, in which applications of similar types are often assigned bands within the same block, dictates that wideband spectrum is indeed heterogeneous. In this paper, we consider heterogeneous wideband spectrum, and exploit its inherent, block-like structure to design efficient compressive spectrum sensing techniques that are well suited for heterogeneous wideband spectrum. We propose a weighted $\ell_1-$minimization sensing information recovery algorithm that achieves more stable recovery than that achieved by existing approaches while accounting for the variations of spectrum occupancy across both the time and frequency dimensions. In addition, we show that our proposed algorithm requires a lesser number of sensing measurements when compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.