Spectrum Sensing for Symmetric α-Stable Noise Model With Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

The key role of spectrum sensing in cognitive radios attracted substantial research attention to improve the performance of detectors. We consider a general model for the receiver noise with the potential of generalization towards modeling noise in various environments. This general noise model describes accurately noise characteristics ranging from the Gaussian noise to the severe impulsive noise. However, many previous studies are based on the ideal Gaussian noise, and they cannot capture the non-Gaussian models. To provide a robust detector against different behaviors of the noise in various environments, we employ a convolutional neural network (CNN) compatible with different noise models. The proposed CNN detector is data-driven, and due to its single-dimensional input layer, it is consistent with the received signal and requires no pre-processing. The likelihood ratio test (LRT), the Wald, and the Rao tests for this problem are derived to enrich the paper with comparative evaluations of the proposed CNN and conventional model-based approaches and other neural networks. Although various simulated scenarios substantiate the general superiority and robustness of the CNN-based against impulsive noise and mismatch of parameters, it requires higher computational complexity than other discussed detectors.