Digital Spectrum Sensing Technique implemented on FPGA systems with application to Digital Television

Resumen

The rapid growth of wireless technology demands to employ the available spectrum efficiently. In this work, an Energy Detector is designed to be used in a Cognitive Radio scenario using a platform based on Software Defined Radio principles. The design of this detector is developed by using Simulink and Xilinx System Generator MATLAB software to be implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device. To sense the spectrum, the energy detector (ED) is the most used approach due to its low computational complexity. Furthermore, ED offers the ability to identify spectrum holes without prior knowledge regarding transmission characteristics of primary users. However, setting a threshold for energy detection requires to estimate noise power, which can be established by appropriate estimation methods. In this regard, a new method is proposed and implemented on FPGA to establish a threshold and detect properly the available spectrum. Results obtained reveal a proper performance of the proposed detector given by  and , respectively, in the SNR range  dB. On the other hand, Digital Television in Cuba requires a robust and efficient automatic signal detection method to identify Television white spaces. Cognitive ratio users would use these spectral holes to increase bandwidth and improve connectivity for wireless communications applications. To this end, this work is aimed to detect white spaces of the Digital Television spectrum through the use of energy detector method. Simulation results show that the detector performs correctly on this scenario.