Survey and Analysis of Cyclostationary Signal Detector Implementations on FPGA

Detecting the presence of primary users and ability to find white spaces in the spectrum are the key enablers of the opportunistic communication. This paper analyzes the trade-offs in cyclostationary-based spectrum sensing algorithm implementations in terms of performance, hardware complexity, and power consumption. The evaluation of the algorithm implementations is performed on field-programmable gate arrays. The analysis presented will provide the designer understanding of dependency between algorithm complexity and power consumption, which is inherently limiting factor of implementation feasibility for cognitive mobile devices.