Reconfigurable hybrid spectrum sensing technique for cognitive radio

Due to massive entry of wireless services with inefficient spectrum resource utilization led to an apparent scarcity of usable radio bandwidth. Cognitive radio is well organized to utilize vacancy in the radio spectrum due to absence of primary user. Spectrum sensing i.e., detecting the presence of primary users in a licensed spectrum is the fundamental task in cognitive radio. This leads to emergence of a variety of approach to detect the presence of primary user. A two stage spectrum sensing can be used to mitigate the disadvantages of single stage detection and append the advantages of individual methods. However, the two stage detection increases the hardware and time taken to sense the spectrum. In our work, the two stage detection algorithm that was originally presented in the work of Geethu and Narayanan (2012) is efficiently implemented on Xilinx xc5vlx110t-1ff1136 FPGA using Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) approach. The proposed architecture shows hardware improvement in terms of area and reconfiguration time over the conventional single stage detection techniques.