Cross-attention mechanism-based spectrum sensing in generalized Gaussian noise

Spectrum sensing (SS) technology is essential for cognitive radio (CR) networks to effectively identify and utilize idle spectrum resources. Due to the influence of noise characteristics in the channel, providing accurate sensing results is challenging. In order to improve the performance of SS under non-Gaussian noise and overcome the limitations of existing methods that are mostly based on a single feature, we propose a novel time-frequency cross fusion network (TFCFN). Specifically, we utilize gated recurrent units (GRU) to capture long-term dependencies in the time domain on the original signals, meanwhile, we perform a fast Fourier transform (FFT) on the original signals to obtain the frequency domain information, and subsequently use convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract the local spatial features in the frequency domain. Ultimately, these time-domain and frequency-domain features are dynamically fused through a cross-attention mechanism to construct more comprehensive and robust features for signal classification. We use generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) as the noise model and reconstruct the RadioML2016.10a dataset to explore the performance under various noise conditions. The experimental results show that compared with the baseline methods, TFCFN exhibits better detection ability and maintains lower complexity in both Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise environments. Notably, when the shape parameter of GGD is set to 0.5 and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal is -16dB, it can maintain the probability of false alarm ( <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msub><mml:mi>P</mml:mi> <mml:mi>f</mml:mi></mml:msub> </mml:math> ) of 10% while still ensuring the probability of detection ( <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msub><mml:mi>P</mml:mi> <mml:mi>d</mml:mi></mml:msub> </mml:math> ) of over 90%.