FPGA realization of spectrum sensing techniques for cognitive radio network

Spectrum sensing is one of the most important and challenging task in cognitive radio network. Its main functionality is to detect the presence of primary user signal and to be cognizant about its surrounding radio spectrum. In this paper, perfomrance of single node spectrum sensing based on energy and cyclostationary feature detection algorithms are compared for different signal to noise ratio (SNR). We have also extended single node sensing to cooperative sensing using AND, OR and equal gain combining (EGC) fusion rule with energy detection technique in each node. We also implemented the cooperative sensing technique in Xilinx Vertex-2pro XC2VP30 (FFG896–7C) Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The experimental results show that cooperative sensing technique using EGC fusion rule can sense the primary user signal upto −16dB SNR with 60% of resource utilization, 140 MHz operating frequency. As a case study, DVB-T signal is considered as primary user signal in this paper.