Spectrum shaping using NC-OFDM for cognitive radio applications

Abstract

Cognitive radio (CR) is an innovative technology that supports dynamic spectrum access to utilise the spectrum more efficiently in an opportunistic manner without interfering with the licensed users. Multi-carrier modulation techniques such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is identified as one of the suitable candidates for the design of CR systems. To provide high data rates while avoiding interference with licensed users, a variant of OFDM called non-contiguous OFDM (NCOFDM) is used in CR. NC-OFDM is useful for dynamic shaping of spectrum based on the channel impairments, interference and jamming threats. In this work, the customised NC-OFDM transceiver link is simulated and compared with the customised OFDM link in the MATLAB environment. It is implemented in Zynq-7000 System-on-Chip (SoC) 7Z020 with radio-frequency front-end board, AD-FMCOMMS3-EBZ Software Defined Radio platform. Implementation of this link is carried out on Spartan-3A FPGA and compared the hardware resource utilisation with Zynq platform. It is observed that the Zynq platform utilises less hardware resources for the implementation. The transmitter spectrum, spectrum after de-activating unwanted subcarriers, the spectrum shaping using raised cosine filtering, spectrum sensing using the correlation of known pattern and FFTbased spectrum sensing are also simulated in the MATLAB.