Fast Adaptive Spectrum Sensing Using Hardware Optimized, Cell Averaging Estimation for Cognitive Radio and Radar Applications

This article describes a technique that enables real-time spectrum sharing by rapidly sensing the spectrum and selecting available frequencies that a system may use for operation. Hardware optimized, cell averaging estimation (HO-CAE) is a method that uses a snapshot of the spectral environment to calculate a dynamic decision threshold that can be used by the fast spectrum sensing (FSS) algorithm to detect available spectrum. This energy detection technique is adaptive as it calculates a new threshold for each spectrum snapshot. A statistical derivation of HO-CAE will be provided with an analysis of probability of false alarm and probability of detection performance for noise only cases and in the presence of a 5G downlink signal. Efficient field programmable gate array implementations of HO-CAE and FSS that enable real-time operation are presented.