Joint Spatial-Temporal Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Networks

In a wireless system with opportunistic spectrum sharing, secondary users equipped with cognitive radios attempt to access radio spectrum that is not being used by the primary licensed users. On a given frequency channel, a secondary user can perform spectrum sensing to determine spatial or temporal opportunities for spectrum reuse. Whereas most prior works address either spatial or temporal sensing in isolation, the authors propose a joint spatial-temporal spectrum sensing scheme, which exploits information from spatial sensing to improve the performance of temporal sensing. They quantify the performance benefit of the joint spatial-temporal scheme over pure spatial sensing and pure temporal sensing based on counting rule and linear quadratic detectors.