Kurtosis and energy based spectrum detection for SDR based RF monitoring system

Wireless communication has become an essential part of todays technology. It is widely used in human life and in various applications. One of them is radio frequency (RF) based applications. In the RF application, frequency bandwidth is an important resource. It is limited by range and should be used wisely. Thus, a regulation for governing the allocation of RF bandwidth needs to be supported by RF monitoring system. It will help the regulation to monitor illegal RF utilization and prevent interference among legal RF sources. In this paper, we propose a software defined radio (SDR) based RF monitoring systems using kurtosis and energy based spectrum detection. These two techniques are selected because they can complement each other to enhance the accuracy of monitoring. Both of them are blind-detection method which means they do not need to know the characteristic of the incoming signal. Hence, it is very useful for detecting the unknown and illegal RF signals. We evaluate the system using LabVIEW. From evaluation results, we can see that the proposed system can indicate the occupied frequencies.