Spectrum Sensing for TV White Space in North America

Spectrum sensing for the use of TV spectrum in North America is addressed in this paper. A unified signature-based spectrum sensing algorithm is designed for the primary licensed signals including NTSC analog TV and ATSC digital TV signals. In addition, an autocorrelation-based spectrum sensing algorithm is proposed for the secondary licensed signals such as wireless microphone signals. To our knowledge, the spectrum sensing algorithms presented in this paper are the first one which can reliably determine the availability of a TV channel for unlicensed radio transmissions in the presence of a strong adjacent channel interferer and the target signal strength is as low as -114 dBm.