Introduction

RF Monitoring

Chun-Ta Kung, Neeraj Venkatesan            Advisor: Ivan Seskar


    Spectrum Sensing is an enabling technology of future opportunistic scenarios. Due to the lack of the spectral resources and the release of TVWS (TV white space), spectrum sensing represents a cornerstone in facilitating accurate spectrum occupancy. It detects the vacant spectral holes and transforms them into usable communication resources.

Currently, numerous spectrum-sensing methods have been proposed. Generally speaking, they can be classified by three features: accuracy, complexity,  and versatility.  In principle, the low-complexity method has wider versatility, lower complexity (i.e. much faster), but less accuracy. The high-accuracy method perceives the occupancy more precisely, but is more limited in the specific type of signal is more complex in implementation.

We use a combination of the two: perform a coarse scanning first, and finely-scan the region of interest afterwards.

Energy detection is a strong candidate to perform coarse spectrum sensing.

Although lots of implementation contributes to energy detection, the major challenge still exists: slow switching time between different spectral regions. Taking advantage of the powerful ORBIT Testbed in WINLAB, we aim to overcome this problem by constructing a cooperative sensing system. The final purpose of the project is to determine RF spectrum occupancy using this framework.