DEVELOPING FRONT END WIDEBAND SPECTRUM SENSOR FOR COGNITIVE RADIO

Cognitive radio is an intelligent wireless communication technology to improve the spectrum utilization. A basic requirement for future cognitive radio networks is wideband spectrum sensing. Accordingly, this paper aims to designing and implementing a wideband front end spectrum sensor built from commercial of the shelf components, in order to measure the spectrum utilization in the higher UHF frequencies. For that purpose, the sensor front end architecture, component details, circuit design, and implementation are provided in details. The sensitivity of the spectrum sensor is determined. Furthermore, practical spectrum sensing results are presented and the spectrum utilization in the higher UHF is estimated. The developed spectrum sensor features are wide bandwidth from 1.7 to 2.7 GHz, low cost, small size and relatively high sensitivity to detect weak signals. The effect of bandwidth of the spectrum sensor on the sensitivity is also demonstrated. The frequency range of the development spectrum sensor can be easily extended to cover lower or higher frequency bands.