Feasibility study on spectrum sharing type cognitive radio system with outband pilot channel

Abstract

This paper proposes a spectrum sharing type cognitive radio system integrated with a dedicated radio system called out-of-band pilot channel (OPC). The OPC notifies the radio configuration information of cognitive base station (CBS), such as operational frequency and PHY/MAC parameters, to cognitive terminal (CT) so that the CT does not need to sense throughout a large range of potential frequency bands and immediately configure itself to connect to the CBS. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed system takes 2.80 seconds to obtain the information on accessible CBS, whereas the conventional system without the OPC takes 8.09 seconds for sensing just 4 frequency channels. It is confirmed that the proposed system achieves a drastic time reduction to obtain the CBS radio configuration information.