Hybrid spectrum sensing architecture using LLCBC MAC for CR-WSN applications

A reconfigurable and hardware proficient hybrid VLSI architecture is greatly necessitated for spectrum sensing that is a combination of energy detection and time domain cyclostationary techniques for cognitive radio applications. One among the key features of Cognitive Radio is Spectrum Sensing which is exploited for allocating unused frequency band efficiently. Various research works are being carried out to investigate the different spectrum sensing methods and analyze the advantages, disadvantage and applications. Here, the novel idea is to design a hybrid architecture by combining energy detection and time domain cyclostationary techniques by exploiting the advantages of those techniques and can be selected based on the applications. Also an energy efficient Low Latency Column Bit Compressed (LLCBC) MAC is greatly utilized in this hybrid architecture to design an Application Specific Integrated Circuit more efficiently. The Proposed method thus helps in achieving significant VLSI parameters such as area, power and delay when compared with the existing time domain cyclostationary technique. The proposed Cyclostationary-based Spectrum Sensing Architecture using LLCBC MAC also yields 4.3% Area reduction, 19.5% Power reduction and with no change in Delay when compared with existing Cyclostationary-based Spectrum Sensing Architecture. Also, in Hybrid Spectrum Sensing Architecture embedding LLCBC MAC unit, a significant reduction in Area and Power corresponding to 57%, and 32% are achieved respectively, besides Hybrid Architecture is 15.28% faster than the individual architectures.