  In this paper we study the problem of identifying active subcarriers in an
OFDM signal from compressive measurements sampled at sub-Nyquist rate. The
problem is of importance in Cognitive Radio systems when secondary users (SUs)
are looking for available spectrum opportunities to communicate over them while
sensing at Nyquist rate sampling can be costly or even impractical in case of
very wide bandwidth. We first study the effect of timing offset and derive the
necessary and sufficient conditions for signal recovery in the oracle-assisted
case when the true active sub-carriers are assumed known. Then we propose an
Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP)-based joint sparse recovery method for
identifying active subcarriers when the timing offset is known. Finally we
extend the problem to the case of unknown timing offset and develop a joint
dictionary learning and sparse approximation algorithm, where in the dictionary
learning phase the timing offset is estimated and in the sparse approximation
phase active subcarriers are identified. The obtained results demonstrate that
active subcarrier identification can be carried out reliably, by using the
developed framework.
