This paper presents GBSense, an innovative compressed spectrum sensing system designed for GHz-bandwidth signals in dynamic spectrum access (DSA) applications. GBSense introduces an efficient approach to periodic non-uniform sampling, capturing wideband signals using significantly lower sampling rates compared to traditional Nyquist sampling. By integrating time-interleaved analog-to-digital conversion, GBSense overcomes the hardware complexity typically associated with traditional multicoset sampling, providing precise, adjustable sampling patterns without the need for analog delay circuits. The system’s ability to process signals with a 2 GHz radio frequency bandwidth using only a 400 MHz average sampling rate enables more efficient spectrum monitoring and access in wideband cognitive radios. Lab tests demonstrate 100% accurate spectrum detection when the spectrum occupancy is below 100 MHz and over 80% accuracy for occupancy up to 200 MHz. Additionally, an integrated system utilizing a low-power Raspberry Pi processor achieves a low processing latency of around 30 ms per frame, demonstrating the system’s potential for DSA applications in next-generation wireless networks.

Due to sophisticated deployments of all kinds of wireless networks (e.g., 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LEO satellite, etc.), multiband signals distribute in a large bandwidth (e.g., from 70 MHz to 8 GHz). Consequently, for network monitoring and spectrum sharing applications, a sniffer for extracting physical layer information, such as structure of packet, with low sampling rate (especially, sub-Nyquist sampling) can significantly improve their cost- and energy-efficiency. However, to achieve a multiband signals sniffer is really a challenge. To this end, we propose Sums, a system that can sniff and analyze multiband signals in a blind manner. Our Sums takes advantage of hardware and algorithm co-design, multi-coset sub-Nyquist sampling hardware, and a multi-task deep learning framework. The hardware component breaks the Nyquist rule to sample GHz bandwidth, but only pays for a 50 MSPS sampling rate. Our multi-task learning framework directly tackles the sampling data to perform spectrum sensing, physical layer protocol recognition, and demodulation for deep inspection from multiband signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sums achieves higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art baselines in spectrum sensing, modulation classification, and demodulation. As a result, our Sums can help researchers and end-users to diagnose or troubleshoot their problems of wireless infrastructures deployments in practice.

The integration of neuromorphic computing and transformers through spiking neural networks (SNNs) offers a promising path to energy-efficient sequence modeling, with the potential to overcome the energy-intensive nature of the artificial neural network (ANN)-based transformers. However, the algorithmic efficiency of SNN-based transformers cannot be fully exploited on GPUs due to architectural incompatibility. This article introduces Xpikeformer, a hybrid analog-digital hardware architecture designed to accelerate SNN-based transformer models. The architecture integrates analog in-memory computing (AIMC) for feedforward and fully connected layers, and a stochastic spiking attention (SSA) engine for efficient attention mechanisms. We detail the design, implementation, and evaluation of Xpikeformer, demonstrating significant improvements in energy consumption and computational efficiency. Through image classification tasks and wireless communication symbol detection tasks, we show that Xpikeformer can achieve inference accuracy comparable to the GPU implementation of ANN-based transformers. Evaluations reveal that Xpikeformer achieves a$13\times $reduction in energy consumption at approximately the same throughput as the state-of-the-art (SOTA) digital accelerator for ANN-based transformers. In addition, Xpikeformer achieves up to$1.9\times $energy reduction compared to the optimal digital ASIC projection of SOTA SNN-based transformers.

Compressed spectrum sensing (CSS) plays a pivotal role in dynamic spectrum access within mobile cognitive radio networks by offering reduced power consumption and lower hardware costs. The multicoset sampler, a well-known implementation for periodic nonuniform sampling, has been widely studied and is considered a promising architecture for realizing CSS. This paper focuses on the design of the multicoset sampling pattern, aiming at enhancing the isometry property of the sensing matrix. Unlike previous studies which assume a noise-free setup, our work considers the problem in a real-world environment with noise. First, we propose a deterministic algorithm for sampling pattern generation, particularly for specific hardware setup parameters. This algorithm offers strict mutual-coherence control in the multicoset sensing matrix. To address more general hardware configurations, we propose two optimization algorithms. One of them searches for nearly optimal sampling patterns through a random search strategy, while the other employs a greedy pursuit strategy to find a local optimizer. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm to iteratively optimize the sampling pattern between consecutive spectrum sensing windows by minimizing a restricted version of mutual coherence. The excellent performance of our proposed algorithms has been demonstrated through numerical experiments and has been verified on a self-developed hardware platform.

Adaptive compressed spectrum sensing (ACSS) can effectively save sampling resources in wideband spectrum sensing. Almost all of the existing ACSS algorithms are based on the discrete multitone signal model. However, real-world spectra are always multiband signals. In this paper, we derive mathematical models and algorithms enabling the ACSS suitable for multiband signals, which can save sampling resources and has lower computational complexity. Firstly, we introduce the multicoset sampling system into ACSS to sample multiband signals. Besides, we propose a leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) based ACSS scheme with low sampling costs. To save sampling resources, we choose only one sampling channel as a testing subset to validate reconstructed signal and repeat this several times with different sampling channels. Then, we use the mean of the multiple validation results to determine the accuracy of the reconstructed signal. To reduce computational complexity, we propose a LOOCV-ACSS algorithm, in which we only perform the least square method several times in the LOOCV procedure, rather than the complicated compressed sensing reconstruction algorithms. Numerical simulations and real-world signal test results demonstrate that our derivation and algorithms are effective to reduce the sampling cost while keeping the same performance as conventional algorithms.

Compared with traditional compressed spectrum sensing, adaptive compressed spectrum sensing can greatly reduce the sampling rate. However, it requires complex optimization algorithms for signal reconstruction and extra samples to validate the accuracy of the reconstructed signal, which makes real-time signal processing impossible. In order to further reduce the number of samples and enable low complexity greedy algorithms, e.g., orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), in the adaptive compressed spectrum sensing, we propose a cross validation (CV) OMP algorithm (CV-OMP) for the adaptive compressed spectrum sensing. The proposed CV-OMP algorithm embeds the CV process into an OMP algorithm, so it does not require extra samples as testing set to validate the accuracy of the reconstructed signal. Furthermore, the accuracy of the reconstructed signal is verified by the CV, which is used as the criterion to stop the iteration, so that the proposed CV-OMP algorithm does not require the prior knowledge of sparsity order for signal reconstruction. Simulation results indicate that the proposed CVOMP algorithm achieves better reconstruction performance than that of conventional OMP algorithms, and also effectively reduce the number of samples in the adaptive compressed spectrum sensing.