Intelligent spectrum occupancy prediction for realistic measurements: GRU based approach

Cognitive radio (CR) technology has always been a research hotspot in the wireless communications field as it has the potential to significantly improve system capacity at the cost of increased processing time and power consumption, which represent highly critical performance indicators (CPI) towards next-generation wireless networks. In particular, the main problem in the CR-based communication links resides in the prediction of spectrum availability in accordance with strict secondary user (SU) CPIs requirements, which is not achievable through the traditional approaches. In this work, we design a novel hierarchical spectrum prediction model, taking advantage from the recurrent neural network (RNN) with the focus on the gated recurrent unit network (GRU). Specifically, the proposed system architecture offers an accrue prediction on the spectrum availability for the SU considering the prior information of the primary user (PU). The performance of the proposed design is illustrated through extensive simulation results. Specifically, real spectrum measurements gathered from Doha, in Qatar are performed to assess the performance accuracy of the designed architecture. In particular different from the conventional scheme that uses a binary representation of spectrum occupancy (idle is '0' and occupied is '1'), we perform training and prediction over the minimum and maximum recorded measurements.