Energy Detector with Baseband Sampling for Cognitive Radio: Real-Time Implementation

Cognitive radio (CR) is a technology that provides a promising new way to improve the efficiency of the use of the electromagnetic spectrum that available. Spectrum sensing helps in the detection of spectrum holes (unused channels of the band), and instantly move into vacant channels while avoiding occupied ones. An energy detector with baseband sampling for CR is presented with mathematical analyses for an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. A brief overview of the energy detection based spectrum sensing for CR technology is introduced. Practical implementation issues on Texas Instruments TMS320C6713 floating point DSP board are presented. Novelties of this work came from a derivation of probability of detection and probability of false alarm for the baseband energy detector without including the sampling theorems and the associated approximation.