FPGA implementation of Spectrum Sensing methods for Cognitive Radio

Abstract

Spectrum sensing (SS) plays a significant role in cognitive radio network. In this paper, we present FPGA architecture implementation of Energy Detection (ED) based spectrum sensing and Goodness of Fit (GoF) based spectrum sensing methods. The aim of these methods is to detect the presence of signal in cognitive radio network (CRN) environment. These techniques have been described in VHDL and implemented on Xilinx FPGA technology, through an experimental demonstration via a bench composed of dongle (RTL2832U), a laptop and a XUP Virtex-II Pro FPGA platform. Implementation results and performance evaluation validate and demonstrate the feasibility of our hardware design. Therefore, this implementation confirms the efficiency (performance and complexity) of blind detection methods for cognitive radio. The results showed that the hardware performances matched well with theoretical analysis.