Wideband spectrum sensing measurement results using tunable front-end and FPGA implementation

In this work, we implement a wideband spectrum sensing receiver using Analog Devices AD9361 RF frontend that can be tuned to frequencies from 70MHz to 6GHz with 30.72MHz bandwidth. An energy detection based spectrum sensing algorithm is implemented on Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA in a pipelined architecture in order to continuously obtain data capture from the RF frontend without any missed samples and reduced latency. The wideband spectrum sensing algorithm uses 8192 FFT bins and provides center frequency and bandwidth of up to 8 non-overlapping frequency bands. The proposed architecture provides frequency resolution of 37.5kHz, time resolution of 8.53ms and latency of 8.78ms.