Wireless spectrum occupancy prediction based on partial periodic pattern mining

Cognitive radio appears as a promising technology to allocate wireless spectrum between licensed and unlicensed users in an efficient way. The availability of spectrum holes vastly affects the throughput and delay of unlicensed users. Predictive methods for inferring the availability of spectrum holes can help to improve spectrum extraction rate and reduce collision rate. In this paper, a spectrum occupancy prediction model based on Partial Periodic Pattern Mining (PPPM) is introduced. The mining aims to identify frequent spectrum occupancy patterns that are hidden in the spectrum usage of a channel. The mined frequent patterns are then used to predict future channel states (i.e., busy or idle). Based on the prediction, unlicensed users will be able to make use of spectrum holes efficiently without introducing significant interference to licensed users. PPPM outperforms traditional Frequent Pattern Mining (FPM) by considering real patterns that do not repeat perfectly due to noise, sensing errors, and irregular behaviors. Using real life network activities we show a significant reduction on miss rate in channel state prediction. With the proposed prediction mechanism, the performance of Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) is substantially improved.