Experimental evaluation of the impact of receiver front-end on spectrum sensing

Abstract

This paper investigates the evaluation of a spectrum sensing technique from the point of view of detection degradation caused by the real receiver front-end imperfections. Two spectrum sensing detectors (energy detector and goodness of fit - based detector) have been tested with various modulation formats for four different types of front-ends in form of daughter-boards for widely used radio device USRP. After analysis of front-end architectures and their noise parameters, the real detection performance has been confirmed by the real experimental measurements and receiver operational characteristics evaluation.