Total Variation Minimization Based Compressive Wideband Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radios

Wideband spectrum sensing is a critical component of a functioning cognitive radio system. Its major challenge is the too high sampling rate requirement. Compressive sensing (CS) promises to be able to deal with it. Nearly all the current CS based compressive wideband spectrum sensing methods exploit only the frequency sparsity to perform. Motivated by the achievement of a fast and robust detection of the wideband spectrum change, total variation mnimization is incorporated to exploit the temporal and frequency structure information to enhance the sparse level. As a sparser vector is obtained, the spectrum sensing period would be shorten and sensing accuracy would be enhanced. Both theoretical evaluation and numerical experiments can demonstrate the performance improvement.