Improved Blind Spectrum Sensing by Covariance Matrix Cholesky Decomposition and RBF-SVM Decision Classification at Low SNRs

Abstract

An improved blind spectrum sensing scheme is established by the covariance matrix Cholesky decomposition and radial basis function (RBF)-support vector machine (SVM) decision classification at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Under strong background noises, the proposed scheme improves the recognition rate of primary users (PUs) than that of the current blind spectrum sensing. First, the ratio of the maximum-to-minimum eigenvalue of a covariance matrix obtained by the Cholesky decomposition is used to construct the statistics. Second, the statistics are labeled with “+1” or “−1,” namely, the energy characteristics of the training samples are extracted and marked with “+1” for PUs and “−1” for noises. Finally, an RBF-SVM classification model, with an intelligent RBF as the SVM kernel function, is obtained by training the above-mentioned statistics and the labels. Thus, the received signals are classified as PUs or not be trained in the SVM model. The threshold possesses self-learning ability, and it distinguishes PU signals from noises effectively. The classification among PU signals and noises is implemented by the optimal SVM decision boundary, derived from maximizing the margin of the decision boundary of trained samples for efficient detection. In addition, the complexity of the statistic construction is lower than that of the conventional maximum minimum eigenvalue (MME). The simulation results show that the RBF in our scheme has 77.5% accuracy at −10 dB, and it outperforms linear kernel function significantly by about 27.5% in accuracy at −10 dB. In addition, the average error probability of the proposed scheme is reduced by about 26% when compared with those of original SVM schemes at −20 dB. The proposed scheme also outperforms the current MME detection in detection probability over 10% at −20 dB. Therefore, the proposed blind spectrum sensing scheme can be efficiently used to detect the PUs by the covariance matrix Cholesky decomposition and the RBF-SVM decision classification in the fifth-generation (5G) communications, especially at low SNRs.