Spectrum sensing and reconstruction for cognitive radio

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened free "white space" spectrum on November 4, 2008. In this way, Google and other technology companies that wanted access to more free spectrum have gotten their wish. The prerequisite of the access to the free spectrum is to find this kind of spectrum. This paper deals with spectrum sensing and spectrum reconstruction under the umbrella of cognitive radio which is the smart radio to explore and exploit the free spectrum. Spectrum analyzer is used to emulate cognitive radio to do spectrum sensing. The advantage of equipment-based spectrum sensing is to perform quick and semi-continuous measurements and extract more information about the spectrum under investigation. Total variation (TV) reconstruction method is employed to rebuild the spectrum and find the boundary of the frequency band which is occupied.