Spectrum Sensing of acoustic OFDM signals

Abstract: OFDM is a fast growing technology in the area of wireless communication due to its numerous advantages and applications. The current and future technologies in the area of wireless communications like WiMAX, WiFi, LTE, MBWA and DVB-T uses the OFDM signals. The OFDM technology is applicable to the radio communication as well as the acoustic communication. Though the licensed spectrum is intended to be used only by the spectrum owners, Cognitive radio is a concept of reusing this licensed spectrum in an unlicensed manner. Cognitive radio is motivated by the measurements of spectrum utilization . Cognitive radio must be able to detect very weak primary users signal and to keep the interference level at a maximum acceptable level. Hence spectrum sensing is an essential part of the cognitive radio. Spectrum is a scarce resource and spectrum sensing is the process of identifying the unused spectrum, without causing any harm to the existing primary user’s signal. The unused spectrum is referred to as spectrum hole or white space and this spectrum hole could be reused by the cognitive radio. This thesis work focuses on implementing primary acoustic transmitter to transmit the OFDM signals from a computer through loudspeaker and receive the signals through a microphone. Then by applying different detection methods on the received OFDM signal for detection of the spectrum hole, the performance of these detection methods is compared here. The commonly used detection methods are power spectrum estimation, energy detection and second–order statistics (GLRT approach, Autocorrelation Function (ACF) detection and cyclostationary feature detection ). The detector based on GLRT approach exploits the structure of the OFDM signal by using the second order statistics of the received data. The thesis mainly focuses on GLRT approach and ACF detectors and compare their performance.