A framework on wideband sensing and direction finding for location aware public safety cognitive radio

Beside providing solutions to the interoperability problem of the first responders, location awareness feature of the cognitive radios can be beneficial for victim and first responder location estimation under extreme conditions. Location and environment based services can be employed to detect and locate victims even when the core wireless communications networks are down. In this paper, a location awareness framework is proposed for victim signal detection and direction estimation. A wideband, multi-channel sensing method is proposed along with a two-antenna multiple signal classification (MUSIC) direction finding algorithm. The performance evaluation of proposed methods are discussed with both simulation and measurement results.