Hardware Implementation of Signal Specific Spectrum Sensing Techniques for WRANs

This work presents hardware implementation of 4 Spectrum Sensing (SS) techniques for ATSC/A53 TV signals, defined in the IEEE 802.22 standard. The implemented techniques are: Field Sync Correlation Detector (FSCD), Segment-Sync Autocorrelation Detector (SSAD), Spectral Correlation (SC), and Pilot Sensing (PS). FSCD and SSAD use the synchronization information in the ATSC signal to measure the occupancy of the channel; and SC and PS are based on the spectral features of the ATSC signal. The 4 techniques were implemented on an FPGA and their performance was checked using an ATSC signal captured in field. Both FSCD and SSAD detect ATSC signals with Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs) above -14.5 dB; SC detects ATSC signals with SNRs above -25 dB; and PS detects ATSC signals with SNRS above -33 dB.