A Simple and Practical Underlay Scheme for Short-Range Secondary Communication

The unprecedented growth in wireless Internet-of-Things and WiFi devices has renewed interest in mechanisms for efficient spectrum reuse. Existing schemes require some level of primary-secondary coordination, cross-channel state estimation and tracking, or activity detection– which complicate implementation. For low-power short-range secondary communication, the main impediment is strong and time-varying (e.g., intermittent) interference from the primary system. This paper proposes a practical underlay scheme that permits reliable secondary communication in this regime. The secondary transmitter merely has to send its signal twice, at very low power - a few dBs above the noise floor, but far below the primary’s interference. Exploiting the repetition structure, reliable and computationally efficient recovery of the secondary signal is possible via canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Experiments using a software radio testbed reveal that, for a secondary user with only two receive antennas, reliable detection of the secondary signal is possible for signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) in the range of −20 to −40 dB. The approach works with unknown time-varying channels, digital or analog modulation, it is immune to carrier frequency offset, and, as a side-benefit, it provides means for accurate synchronization of the secondary user even at very low SINR.