Design and Implementation

of Recongurable VLSI Architecture

for Optimized Performance Cognitive
Radio Wideband Spectrum Sensing
S. Gayathri and K.S. Sujatha

Abstract Spectrum sensing performs major function in cognitive radio to efciently use the underutilized spectrum. It has to detect the presence of primary user
signal in a channel and has to utilize in primary users absence. In wideband
spectrum sensing, a wide frequency has to be sensed. In this paper, a recongurable
VLSI architecture is designed to perform cooperative spectrum sensing for wideband, this needs a local detection, which is fundamental for cooperative sensing.
Each and every individual secondary user has to perform energy detection. In this
paper, energy detection technique used is based on the Neyman Pearson criterion.
Then the cooperative decision is taken which increases the sensing performance.
The designed architecture is then implemented in Xilinx Virtex-4 Field programmable Gate array.

Keywords Neyman pearson criterion Xilinx Virtex-4 eld programmable gate

array MATLAB Cognitive radio network

1 Introduction
Radio spectrum is a natural resource which is essential for wireless systems.
Progress in wireless communication system has increased the demand of radio
spectrum. Cognitive radio has become a reassuring approach to mitigate the
spectrum scarcity and to increase the efciency of the spectrum utilization. In
cognitive radio systems, the secondary user (unlicensed user) is allowed by primary
user to follow the dynamic spectrum access policy. Spectrum sensing is the basic
function of cognitive radio. In order to make use of the radio spectrum, CR has to
S. Gayathri (&)
K.S. Sujatha
Department of ECE, Easwari Engineering College, Chennai, India
e-mail: gayathrisubramanian90@gmail.com
K.S. Sujatha
e-mail: sujatha.ks@srmeaswari.ac.in
Springer India 2016
L.P. Suresh and B.K. Panigrahi (eds.), Proceedings of the International
Conference on Soft Computing Systems, Advances in Intelligent Systems
and Computing 397, DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-2671-0_67

711

712

S. Gayathri and K.S. Sujatha

continuously monitor the spectrum to identify whether spectrum is idle or busy.

This mechanism is known as spectrum sensing. Spectrum sensing symbolizes a
major role in cognitive radio systems because the other functions of CR depend on
spectrum sensing. Spectrum sensing has to execute two functions as follows; rst, it
has to detect the white space or unoccupied bands; and second, it has to continuously monitor the spectrum to sense the arrival of primary user during transmission.
Many spectrum sensing schemes were introduced which are as follows: energy
detection technique, coherent detection method, and cyclostationary feature
detection. These approaches are performed for local sensing. From the above
approaches, energy detection technique is known to be the easiest approach in
existence. The channel degradation caused by the shadowing and multipath effects
will arise the hidden terminal problem in local sensing. Henceforth, multinode
sensing (or) cooperative sensing helps us to manipulate this problem. It is of two
types namely centralized and distributed. In centralized cooperative sensing
approach, multiple secondary users will send either the one bit hard decision control
channel or energy statistics to the fusion centre which in turn decides whether the
band is occupied or not. In distributed approach, the cognitive radios will take their
own decision based on the sensing report from the neighbouring cognitive radios.
Both the hidden terminal problem and designing a hardware to perform wide band
sensing are the major design challenges in cognitive radio. Therefore, a recongurable architecture is proposed in this work to perform collaborative wideband
sensing to overcome this problem.

2 Related Works
The existing literature for wideband spectrum sensing for CR system is scarce or
little. A wavelet transform based spectrum sensing was introduced [1] which uses
wavelet transform to estimate power spectral density; however, it is not feasible in
real-time sensing. Thomson multitaper spectral estimation was proposed in [2] to
estimate PSD. Whereas, its dependency of eigenvalue decomposition, hardware
realization of this method is impractical. In [3], spectral estimator based on FFT is
proposed where lter banks are used to convert the wideband into narrowband and
then PSD is estimated for each narrowband. This method turns out to be impractical
because of improper ltering.
In [4], a sensing processor for wideband is designed using multitaper windowed
frequency domain power detector. It has a drawback of partial realization in FPGA.
In [5], a cooperative spectrum sensing design is implemented in FPGA but it is
restricted for narrowband sensing. In this paper, a wideband has to be sensed
henceforth a recongurable architecture with multiple direct down converter
channelized cognitive radios for multinode detection is designed. The proposed
architecture is then implemented in FPGA and its area requirements are reported.

Design and Implementation of Recongurable VLSI Architecture

713

3 System Architecture
This section proposes an architecture for cooperative spectrum sensing cognitive
radio for wideband sensing. As shown in Fig. 1, the cooperative sensing architecture of a cognitive radio consists of two units. The two units are as follows:
Local detection unit and hard decision logic unit. Local detection unit performs
local sensing using energy detection method. Whereas in the hard decision logic
unit along with the local decision of the cognitive radio, local decision form
multiple cognitive radios is compared with the threshold and gives out the nal
sensing output.

3.1

Local Detection Unit

The proposed work is for wideband cooperative sensing; therefore, multiple CR

undergoes local sensing and computes a one bit decision control output. The local
detection unit in the proposed architecture consists of IF sampling wideband
receiver architecture with digital IQ baseband processing unit. The receiver architecture consists of RF front end and ADC block and IQ Digital down
converter-based channelizer. In the RF front end, bandpass sampling is done in
digital domain by a digital bandpass lter (antialising lter) and mixed with an LO
to produce the IF signal which is given to the ADC. The ADC performs sampling
and gives out time domain samples, xk(nTs). Consider the received wideband signal
x(t), is given as a input to RF front end and ADC block, where bandpass sampling is
done on the received signal. The bandpass sampled output is given as input to IO
digital down converted channelizer block [6], which gives out K subbands with
discrete time domain samples Xk xk 1; xk 2; . . .xk N where k 1; 2; . . .; k.
The time domain samples are given as input to the local detection unit as shown in
Fig. 2. ADC cannot be realizable in FPGA and the time domain samples are
Fig. 1 Proposed architecture
of cooperative spectrum
sensing cognitive radio

Received signal

Local detection
unit

Hard decision
logic unit

Local detection
from CR1

Local detection
from CR2

Local detection
from CR3
Final sensing output

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S. Gayathri and K.S. Sujatha

Fig. 2 Local detection unit

for a cognitive radio

x(t)

I(n) & Q(n) of

K subbands

x(nTs)
RF
front
end
&
ADC

To
decision
logic

IQ DDC
channelizer

K
subband
binary
decision

I2 k(n) &Q2k(n)

Square
device

Add
I&Q

Average
N samples

demultiplexed to K subbands. Further operation takes place as narrowband channelization process. The samples are given to K IQ digital down converters where
samples are divided into inphase components, Ik(n) and quadrature components,
Qk(n) using a demultiplexer and followed by multiplying it with monobit multiplier
[7]. The computed samples undergo digital lowpass FIR ltering and digital
downsampling to decimate the sampling rate. The ltered samples are then squared
using a multipler. The squared inphase and quadrature samples are then added by
sum block and computes jxk nj2 . Finally, the average of N samples is taken using
the average FIR lter to take the mean of the sample which gives out the energy
P
statics of the signal in K subband, Nn1 jxk nj2 . The test static, Tk(xk) is compared
with the derived threshold value, rk for pf = 0.1. The threshold rk for local detection
is obtained from the formula [8] as follows:
rk Q1

 p!
pf r2v 2N
Nr2v

where Pf is probability of false detection and N is number of samples. If the Tk(xk)

exceeds the threshold then it sends binary value 1 as a binary decision input to the
hard decision logic unit and binary value 0 if Tk(xk) is less than threshold (Fig. 3).

3.2

Hard Decision Logic Unit

In the hard decision logic, multiple CR with distributed approach is performed.

i.e., nal decision of the presence of primary user is taken after collaboratively
exchanging the local detection decision with each other. Multiple CR gives out

Design and Implementation of Recongurable VLSI Architecture

Fig. 3 IQ digital down
converted channelization

Mult
+1/-1

ADC

Mult
+1/-1

715

LPF

LPF

Mult
+1/-1

LPF

Mult
+1/-1

LPF

K subband local detection sensing results in the form of vector which is represented
as Yk Tk;1 1; Tk;2 2; . . .Tk;m N . The 1 bit binary decision output for K subands
from local detection of M number of CRs are weighted and AND operation is
Q
k
T
performed, i.e., Zk M
i1 Wk;i Yk;i . Zk is then compared with threshold, r . The
threshold, rk value is 1 because of using hard decision AND logic. Finally, the
hard decision logic gives out 1 if the primary user is present and if 0 is obtained
then the band is identied as free, i.e., the primary user is absent at the particular
band. The binary decision for K subband from M CRs should be 0 for further data
transmission by cognitive radio.

4 Results and Discussions

The RF front end of the receiver architecture is simulated in MATLAB. A 10 GHz
Wideband signal is modeled and bandpass ltering is done. The ltered signal is
then modulated with a carrier wave and given to ADC. The ADC computes time
domain samples. The discrete time domain samples computed from ADC sampling
is given as the input to the VHDL module of cooperative spectrum sensing.
The VHDL module has four local detection submodules meant for four Cognitive
radios, which gives it binary decision output after comparing it with the average
submodule output with the threshold. The threshold value used is based on Pf = 0.1.
The binary decision is given to hard decision unit where the cooperative decision is
taken and a nal binary decision out is obtained. The simulation result of the
module of cooperative spectrum sensing is given in Fig. 4.

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S. Gayathri and K.S. Sujatha

Fig. 4 Simulation result of wideband cooperative spectrum sensing cognitive radio

Fig. 5 Design summary report

4.1

Implementation Results in Virtex Board

The proposed architecture is implemented in virtex-4 FPGA after simulating and

synthesizing it with Xilinx Isim 13.2 suite. The net list can then be generated and
downloaded in Virtex-4 FPGA kit. The design summary report of the implementation are given in Fig. 5 shows number of multipliers, look up table and slices has
been used. This summary report clearly points out that the proposed architecture
outperforms the other implementations by consuming less area and completely
realizable in FPGA.

5 Conclusion and Future Work

In this paper, a cooperative spectrum sensing scheme has been proposed for
wideband sensing cognitive radio. Thus the cooperative sensing method improves
the spectrum sensing performance over wide frequency range. Simultaneously, it

Design and Implementation of Recongurable VLSI Architecture

717

solves the hidden terminal problem in the cognitive radio network and it can be
easily implemented in FPGA.
In future, the work will be focused on optimizing the power consumed by the
architecture by applying low power techniques like clock gating, etc. and furthermore, replacing lters with multiplierless lters.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Dr. K. Kathiravan for his valuable suggestions to improve the quality of work.

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