Spectrum Measurements and Analysis for Cognitive Radio Applications in Palestine

In this paper, we first investigate spectrum occupancy of the Palestinian FM, UHF and GSM bands by using the low-cost software defined radio (SDR) device RTL-SDR. The spectrum occupancy measurements provide evidence that the UHF television (TV) band is under-utilized resulting in TV white spaces. Therefore, dynamic spectrum access based on cognitive radio (CR) can significantly improve spectrum utilization for wireless communications. In Particular, we propose three solutions for mobile spectrum shortage based on three CR concepts, namely: interweave CR, underlay CR, and overlay CR. In the first solution, an interweave CR system is suggested to efficiently utilize the TV white spaces in the UHF TV band. In the second solution, an underlay CR system based on wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) is introduced to underlay the primary GSM system. In the third solution, an overlay CR system is proposed based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to share the same spectrum band with the primary GSM system. It is confirmed that the proposed solutions can solve the spectrum scarcity and limit the interference levels, and consequently improve system capacity.