Boost Spectrum Prediction With Temporal Frequency Fusion Network via Transfer Learning

Modeling and predicting the radio spectrum is vital for spectrum management, such as spectrum sharing and anomaly detection. Nevertheless, the precise spectrum prediction is challenging due to the interference from both intra-spectrum and external factors. To tackle these complex internal and external correlations, we develop a model named TF 2 AN, consisting of three components: 1) a robust signal detection algorithm based on image processing, 2) an attention-based Long Short-term Memory network to capture the temporal-frequency correlations, 3) a generalized fusion module to take the heterogeneous external factors into account. This structure shows prominent effectiveness for spectrum prediction on a single monitoring station with sufficient data. However, when the data derived from a single station is insufficient, the performance of the deep learning model will decline a lot. Considering that more than one monitoring station is deployed in practice, the new challenge becomes how to enhance our model by leveraging the data from multiple stations or frequency bands. Therefore, we further propose T-TF 2 AN, a transfer learning-based framework for data augmentation and knowledge sharing in spectrum prediction. Compared to TF 2 AN, better performance is achieved. Besides, the model interpretability and training efficiency are also discussed with two case studies, respectively.