In recent years, with the rapid development in wireless communication and 5G networks, the rapid growth in mobile users has been accompanied by an increasing demand for the electromagnetic spectrum. The birth of cognitive radio and its spectrum-sensing technology provides hope for solving the problem of low utilization of the wireless spectrum. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been widely discussed globally. Deep learning technology, known for its strong learning ability and adaptability, plays a significant role in this field. Moreover, integrating deep learning with wireless communication technology has become a prominent research direction in recent years. The research objective of this paper is to summarize the algorithm of cognitive radio spectrum-sensing technology combined with deep learning technology. To review the advantages of deep-learning-based spectrum-sensing algorithms, this paper first introduces the traditional spectrum-sensing methods. It summarizes and compares the advantages and disadvantages of each method. It then describes the application of deep learning algorithms in spectrum sensing and focuses on the typical deep-neural-network-based sensing methods. Then, the existing deep-learning-based cooperative spectrum-sensing methods are summarized. Finally, the deep learning spectrum-sensing methods are discussed, along with challenges in the field and future research directions.

Cognitive radio networks enable the detection and opportunistic access to an idle spectrum through spectrum-sensing technologies, thus providing services to secondary users. However, at a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), existing spectrum-sensing methods, such as energy statistics and cyclostationary detection, tend to fail or become overly complex, limiting their sensing accuracy in complex application scenarios. In recent years, the integration of deep learning with wireless communications has shown significant potential. Utilizing neural networks to learn the statistical characteristics of signals can effectively adapt to the changing communication environment. To enhance spectrum-sensing performance under low-SNR conditions, this paper proposes a deep-learning-based spectrum-sensing method that combines multiple signal features, including energy statistics, power spectrum, cyclostationarity, and I/Q components. The proposed method used these combined features to form a specific matrix, which was then efficiently learned and detected through the designed ‘SenseNet’ network. Experimental results showed that at an SNR of −20 dB, the SenseNet model achieved a 58.8% spectrum-sensing accuracy, which is a 3.3% improvement over the existing convolutional neural network model.