Efficient improvement of energy detection technique in cognitive radio networks using K-nearest neighbour (KNN) algorithm

With the birth of the IoT era, it is evident that the existing number of devices is going to rise exponentially. Any two devices will communicate with each other using the same frequency band with limited availability. Therefore, it is of vital importance that this frequency band used for communication be used efficiently to accommodate the maximum number of devices with the available radio resources. Cognitive radio (CR) technology serves this exact purpose. The stated one is an intelligent radio that is made to automatically identify the optimal wireless channel in the available wireless spectrum at a given instant. An important functionality of CR is spectrum sensing. Energy detection is a very popular algorithm used for spectrum sensing in CR technology for efficient allocation of radio resources to the devices intended to communicate with each other. Energy detection detects the presence of a primary user (PU) signal by continuously monitoring a selected frequency bandwidth. The conventional energy detection technique is known to perform poorly in lower SNR ranges. This paper works towards the improvement of the energy detection algorithm with the help of machine learning (ML). The ML model uses the general properties of the signal as training data and classifies between a PU signal and noise at very low SNR ranges (− 25 to − 10 dB). In this research, a K-nearest neighbours (KNN) model is selected for its versatility and simplicity. Upon testing the model with an out-of-sample dataset, the KNN model produced a detection accuracy of 94.5%.