Collaborative Subgraph Learning based Spectrum Sensing under Partial Observations

Data-driven spectrum sensing is a key technology for addressing complex challenges in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). Traditional methods are typically designed for simple single-band scenarios and perform poorly in practical wideband applications. In real-world systems, a single Secondary User (SU) is often restricted by energy, time, and hardware capabilities during real-time sensing. Consequently, only local and fragmented frequency information can be obtained. This partial sensing leads to a severe lack of training data. Additionally, the lack of historical records for emerging frequency bands, combined with data incompleteness due to resource constraints, creates training bottlenecks for data-driven models and limits the reliability of sensing. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework based on Collaborative Subgraph Learning and Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). This approach enables Secondary Users to perform collaborative sensing through distributed subgraph learning. By utilizing GNNs to extract features and model multi-band correlations, a new distributed GNNs architecture is designed to efficiently detect wideband spectrum occupancy, even with partial observations. Within this framework, all frequency bands in the wideband spectrum pool are treated as a unified graph, while the bands observed by each SU form a subgraph. Subsequently, the complete spectrum graph is constructed through the joint training and aggregation of these subgraphs. By integrating hyperbolic geometry into GNNs, this method better captures the hierarchical structure of spectrum patterns, providing a more accurate and efficient sensing model. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the second-best HCNNs model, the proposed framework improves sensing accuracy by 3.8% on average across various test environments, while reducing key resource consumption by 18.4% on average.