An Efficient Implementation of NC-OFDM Transceivers for Cognitive Radios

In this paper, we present an efficient implementation of a non-contiguous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NC-OFDM) transceiver for cognitive radio systems. NC-OFDM is designed to transmit information in the presence of incumbent users, deactivating subcarriers located in the vicinity of these users to avoid interference. Given that the. core, component of an NC-OFDM transceiver is the fast Fourier transform (FFT), and that several of the subcarriers are deactivated, it is possible to reduce the execution time by "pruning" the FFT. We propose an algorithm that efficiently and quickly primes the FFT for NC-OFDM transceivers. Results show that the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms other FFT pruning algorithms when a medium to large number of subcarriers have been deactivated