Experimentally detecting IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi based on cyclostationarity features for ultra-wide band cognitive radios

In this paper we present some experimental results on the cyclostationarity properties of the IEEE802.11n Wi-Fi transmissions, and the usage of the cyclostationarity features to detect IEEE802.11n radios in the context of ultra wide band (UWB) based cognitive radios (CR). The IEEE 802.11n lies in the UWB frequency range, at 5.2GHz, and the CR needs to successfully detect the legacy user to avoid interference. By performing cyclostationarity analysis we compute the cyclic power spectrum (CPS) of the IEEE802.11n transmissions and use it for detecting the presence of the legacy user. We conduct experimentations to perform our study under different channel conditions and perform post signal analysis to measure the detection performance using the CPS based detection technique. The probability of false alarm and the probability of missed detection are computed and the results are presented for different channel conditions, together with the CPS of the legacy user's signal.