Indoor Spectrum Occupancy in Morocco for Cognitive Radio applications: Measurements and Analysis

Cognitive Radio (CR) is becoming a necessity for improving the spectrum use in the future, as it provides efficient utilization of the available frequency bands by allowing unlicensed users to operate in the temporarily unoccupied bands by the licensed users. To fit the requirements of an effective dynamic spectrum access, the forthcoming strategies must take into account the spectrum usage of the geographical area. Thus, several Spectrum Occupancy (SO) measurements have been performed around the world. In Morocco, no indoor spectrum usage have been studied yet. In this paper, we present the first indoor SO measurements conducted in Morocco using a powerful measurement setup. The scanned bands were intensively analyzed in terms of different parameters such as power spectrum and duty cycle per channel and band. The obtained results show that in every licensed band a significant part is unused. Furthermore, we were able to find out bands that may be suitable for future cognitive radio applications.