System on Chip implementation of dual-band spectrum sensing using energy detection algorithm

Due to a rising number of wireless devices with the advent of the internet of things (IOT), there is a huge demand for radio spectrum. Numerous techniques were developed to use the limited radio spectrum efficiently, such as multiplexing and multiple access techniques. However, these techniques do not provide statistical information about utilization efficiency and spatio-temporal usage of vacant bands. In the recent past, cognitive radio technology has emerged as a favourable technology that can provide vacant band information temporally, which is useful to utilize the radio spectrum more efficiently. The crucial unit that can provide vacant band information is the spectrum sensing unit. Quite a few signal processing algorithms have been implemented and reported for single-band and multi-band sensing. However, very few works are reported on real-time implementation of multi-band detection using reconfigurable hardware such as SoC/FPGA. Hence, this paper presents System-on-Chip (SoC) implementation of single-band and dual-band sensing using an energy detection algorithm. The rationale for considering PYNQ SoC is due to its advanced features that are essential for the evolution of cognitive radio technology. The resource utilization and power required for the proposed prototypes are estimated and compared with the prior works. The results reveal that the performance of the developed prototype is in good agreement with the simulation results based on Monte-Carlo methods of 1000 iterations.