Real-Time FPGA-Based Multi-Beam Directional Sensing of 2.4 GHz ISM RF Sources

A real-time directional sensing system is proposed for 2.4 GHz ISM band by exploiting the concept of spatiotemporal spectral white spaces. The proposed system consists of a 16-element patch antenna array, an FFT-based multi-beam beamformer and an energy detector. Our system operates at the baseband with quadrature sampling. Furthermore, digital architectures for two energy detectors that employ integrate-and dump circuits are presented. With the multi-beam beamformer, the first energy detector can be employed to directional sensing and the second can be employed for both directional and spectral sensing of radio frequency sources. The multi-beam beamformer having 16 beams and the energy detectors are implemented on a ROACH-2 based FPGA system with a 160 MHz clock. With an 8-point temporal FFT, the second energy detector provides approximately 20 MHz bandwidth per temporal FFT-bin. Preliminary experimental measurements obtained with Wi-Fi devices and the first energy detector verify the proof-of-concept directional sensing of the proposed system.