Experimental Validation of Spectrum Sensing on Various Transceivers Using Software Defined Radio

Cognitive radio (CR) and software-defined radio (SDR) system technologies provide added flexibility and offer improved spectrum efficiency. Cognitive radio is an obstreperous radio communication and networking technology. It is presently undergoing drastic development due to its potential to resolve many of the problems affecting existing systems. Spectrum sensing is the crucial in empowering technology of CR to sense the existence of primary users or licensed user signals and exploit the spectrum holes. Hence, this paper addresses the design of Energy detection spectrum sensing technique for 16-QAM and 64-QAM transceivers employing SDR testbed. In addition, this paper also addresses the practical signal detection and the impact of various filtering windowing methods on detected signals. Furthermore, the impact of different simulation channels such as dynamic channel model and frequency selective faded channel models with Rayleigh and Rician fadings, are presented by testing the spectrum sensing technique on differential phase shift keying transceiver. For practical proof of the concepts, experimental tests are performed using SDR testbed that employs universal software radio peripheral N210 as hardware platform and GNU Radio as an open source free software platform. Therefore, I have reduced the cost of implementation drastically.