Efficient FPGA implementation of a variable digital filter based spectrum sensing scheme for cognitive IoT systems

Wireless communication in Internet of Things (IoT) systems involves several devices communicating in the limited available frequency spectrum using different wireless communication standards. To achieve efficient spectrum usage in the IoT systems, it is desired to have the ability of dynamic spectrum allocation. Cognitive radios (CR) enable efficient spectrum utilization by performing spectrum sensing to gain the knowledge of current spectrum occupancy and dynamically reconfiguring the communication parameters, making them highly suitable for IoT systems. In this paper, we present the efficient hardware implementation of a spectrum sensing scheme for CR based IoT applications that require large bandwidth. We show that the proposed implementation on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can achieve over 1.56x improvement in performance, while consuming 77% less generic resources and at a fractionally higher power consumption.