Spectrum Sensing, Access and Coexistence Testbed

for Cognitive Radio Using USRP

Zhi Yan, Zhangchao Ma, Hanwen Cao, Gang Li, and Wenbo Wang
Key Lab of Universal Wireless Communications Ministry of Education
School of Telecommunications Engineering
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
P. O. Box 93#, Xitucheng Road No.10, Beijing, 100876, P. R. China
Email: {yanzhibupt, mzcroy, hanwen.cao, ligangcool}@gmail.com, wbwang@bupt.edu.cn

AbstractThe idea of cognitive radio has created a great

interest in academic and industrial research recently. As a
result, there are a large number of proposals for physical and
network layer functionalities. In this paper, we demonstrate an
experimental platform with the USRP board developed by Ettus
Research that can facilitate the development of PHY and MAC
layers functionality. Some key results from this experience so far
are presented, including an over-the-air interoperability analysis
of two different SDR (Software Defined Radio) architectures in
the same frequency band, the effect of dynamic spectrum access
on legacy systems and analysis of actual co-existence experiences
involving primary users and secondary opportunistic spectrum
users. In particular, we focus our attention on spectrum sensing
and spectrum coexistence as an example that incorporates both
digital signal processing and networking techniques to show how
this platform could be used to conduct comprehensive research
in cognitive radio.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Nowadays, as the development of the technology in wireless
communication, our spectral resources have become more
and more limited, especially the frequencies below 3 GHz.
However, not all of these frequencies are used efficiently. In Fig. 1. The testbed setup.
fact, a certain number of frequency bands are underutilized in
spectacular times and locations, such as frequency band range
between 54 to 862 MHz which WRAN (Wireless Regional point of observation. Unique to cognitive radio operation is the
Area Networks) is now focused on. requirement that the radio is able to sense the environment over
Considering Wireless systems today are characterized by huge swaths of spectrum and adapt to it since the radio does
wasteful static spectrum allocations, fixed radio functions, not have primary rights to any pre-assigned frequencies[3].
and limited network coordination, cognitive radio has been Also, this new radio functionality will involve the design of
proposed as a possible solution to improve spectrum utilization various analog, digital, and network processing techniques in
via opportunistic spectrum sharing. So this newly technology order to meet challenging radio sensitivity requirements and
is assured to be the most promising choice to relieve the wideband frequency agility.
limitation of spectrum resource especially for the frequency Secondly, coexistence, as referred to in this paper, is the
band below 3 GHz. ability of two or more nodes/entities to share a common
However, cognitive radio is considered lower priority or frequency band. Cognitive radio coexistence can largely help
secondary users of spectrum allocated to primary or licensed to increase the efficiency of spectrum utilization, where two or
users. One of its fundamental requirement is to avoid inter- more services can share a common frequency band. Coexis-
ference to potential primary users in their vicinity. So the tence in cognitive radio is mainly focused on the coexistence
growing interest in spectrum sensing, access and co-existence of interference-free.The term interference-free coexistence is
of cognitive radio research has spurred an increasing number the term denoting ability for two or more entities to share a
of papers in the recent years[1]-[5]. common space without causing interference to each other. In
Firstly, spectrum sensing of cognitive radio focuses on this case, the two or more entities are wireless transmissions
the spectrum hole or the spectrum whitespace. The term occupying a common frequency spectrum segment. Exclusive
whitespace denotes spectrum that is unused at any particular spectrum usage rights for some currently licensed frequency

978-1-4244-1708-7/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE 270

bands can support more services if these secondary (oppor-
tunistic) users can operate on an interference-free basis with
the primary/legacy user. This is another key area in cognitive
radio and dynamic spectrum access research[4].
Although cognitive radios promise dramatic improvements
in spectrum utilization and revolution in the way the spectrum
is used, their realization still requires technical proofs of
feasibility and regulatory approval. In this paper, we present
an experimental platform with the USRP (Universal Soft-
ware Radio Peripheral) that can facilitate the development of
physical and network layer functionalities in feasible system
architecture for cognitive radios. The main objective of the
testbed is to exploit unused spectrum adjacent to a narrowband
primary user frequencies. These systems have the capability to
accomplish the experimental objectives and to investigate the
effects of dynamic spectrum access on legacy systems because
each of the systems has been built with reconfigurability and
cognitive functionality in mind. In addition, these abilities can
also be deactivated allowing either system to assume the role
of a fixed, non-adaptive legacy system.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the
system architectures of the testbed, and derives the key feature
of the different architectures used for the experiment. The
system implementation and testbed scenarios are presented in
Section 3. In Section 4, we give the summary of the work and
conclusion.
II. S YSTEM A RCHITECTURE
The system architecture is shown in Fig. 2. The scenario
involved two cognitive radio systems with different archi-
tecture designs and cognitive capabilities and a Monitor.
Primary user A(PA) and Primary user B(PB) are assumed the
role of two primary users, which achieve the communication
through frequency-division-duplex(FDD) scheme with each
other, while the Secondary user A(SA) and Secondary user
B(SB) are assumed the role of two opportunistic secondary
users, which communicate with each other with the trans-
mission mode of semiduplex scheme (a simplified WLAN
CSMA protocol). Monitor is considered to be an auxiliary role,
which is used to view the state of the spectrum utilization and
analyze the received results. In order to avoid the interfering
the primary users when the PA and PB want to communicate
with each other, the architecture and design of SA and SB
can be reconfigurable whose parameters and structures can
be dynamically reconfigured according to a less complex
cognitive control implementation. This scenario essentially
explored the ability of these two different CR architectures,
using different wireless communication schemes, to coexist
on non-interfering.
A. RF/IF Frond-End
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) from
Ettus Research, a device connected to computer with USB
connection, which works with GNU Radio to create the
software defined radios, is adopted as the RF front-end for
our platform. GNU Radio is an open source and free software
USB USB
Secondary Secondary
user A user B
USB
Monitor
USB USB
Primary user A Primary user B
Fig. 2. System architecture.
toolkit, which allows the construction of radios where the
actual waveforms transmitted and received are defined by
software. In essence, USRP board is a RF and IF converter
which sends or receives I/Q baseband signal to/from the host
by the USB 2.0 cable. The USRP product family includes the
motherboard, which contains an FPGA and several AD/DA
converters, and changeable plug-in daughterboards that cover
different frequency ranges. With the various daughterboards,
the USRP has an overall range from DC to 2.9 GHz, which
covers everything from AM radio to Wi-Fi and beyond.
FLEX2400 daughter board with the ability of covering the
frequency range from 2.3 GHz to 2.9 GHz is used in our
case[9][10].
B. DSP Modules
All the base band signal processing is implemented in
software on the general computer by C++ programming.
Although a FPGA-DSP testbed can provide higher throughput
and shorter latency, using high level programming language on
common Linux system makes people with little or no hardware
background implement the platform very easy. The software
tools used in the development include C++, Python, and IT++
library[11].
C. Monitor
The Monitor is consisting of a general PC and a USRP
board, which receives the signal from the air and analyzes
the state of spectrum utilization. All the result analysis can be
got in graphic user interfaces of power spectral density of the
received signal.
III. S YSTEM I MPLEMENTATION
In this section, the details of different roles of the testbed
and the implementation of PHY and MAC layer are described.
Two different SDR architectures are presented, one is primary
user architecture, which is consisting of two common PC and
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Fig. 3. Basic block diagram of the TXRX signal chain of the two primary
users.
Fig. 4. Constellation diagram of the received QPSK signal.
two USRP boards, and another is secondary user architecture,
which has the same hardware configuration with the primary
user architecture. Both of them play a different role in the
cognitive radio system.
A. Primary user
The primary user architecture is configured as a single
carrier quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signals based
modem operating at a center frequency of 2449.2MHz and
2450.8MHz. Fig. 3 illustrates the basic block diagram of the
signal chain of the two primary users.
The two primary users communicate with each other
through FDD scheme at either side of the frequency of
2450MHz with the distance of about two or three meters. The
transmit power of the QPSK is related to many factors, such
as software gain, hardware gain, antenna gain and the distance
between the two users. So we just test the post SNR at the
receiver with some algorithm (M2 M4 algorithm [8] in our
case) to reconfigure the above related parameters to guarantee
the performance of the two primary users. The transmitter data
symbol rates are 200kbps with software configuration.
Fig. 4 shows the constellation diagram of received In-Phase
(I) and Quadrature (Q) signal components on the x and y
axes, respectively, following the timing recovery stage of the
transceiver signal chain illustrated in Fig. 3. This indicates
that the signal was received correctly, and following the
demodulation and de-framing stages, the entire end to end
signal-chain was completed successfully.
B. Secondary user
1) The PHY Layer: In order to demonstrate the spectrum
coexistence between the primary users and the secondary
users, the secondary users use reconfigurable orthogonal fre-
quency division multiplexing (OFDM) to avoid the primary
users and avail of the spectrum white spaces at the same time.
The basic block diagram of TXRX signal chain is shown in
Fig. 5. The process involves the following tasks:
Threshold
X(t) 2
A/D N pt. FFT  Average over T Energy detect
86535;
Fig. 6. Implementation of an energy detector using periodogram averaging[2].
. Detection of unused frequency spectrum and avoidance of
active primary user frequencies (spectrum whitespace detec-
tion).
. Reconfiguration to avail of the unused spectrum (exploiting
available spectrum).
. Routine DSP: including scrambling/descrambling, CRC
code/ check, channel coding/decoding, framing/defaming, and
OFDM modulation/demodulation, etc.
a) Spectrum hole detection and exploitation: The spec-
trum sensing function enables the cognitive radio to adapt
to its environment by detecting spectrum holes. Generally,
the spectrum sensing techniques can be classified as trans-
mitter detection, cooperative detection, and interference-based
detection. Energy detection as a simple transmitter detection
is implemented in our testbed. This optimal technique has
been extensively used in radiometry. An energy detector can
be implemented similar to a spectrum analyzer by averaging
frequency bins of a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), as outlined
in Fig. 6. Processing gain is proportional to FFT size N and
observation/averaging time T [2].
In our testbed, the energy detector is implemented using
N =128 points FFT with a fully parallel pipelined architecture
for the fastest speed. Due to A/D sampling at 4 MHz after
receiver decimation, this implementation has 31.25 kHz FFT
bin resolution. Each block of FFT outputs is averaged using
an accumulator with run-time controllable number of averages.
Longer averaging time reduces the noise power thus improves
SNR but with longer latency. So we choose 128100 spectral
average(3.2ms) of 128 points FFT, which is acceptable in our
real time systems. Before the testbed starts, we should test the
noise power with the energy detection above described and
the threshold of energy detection is configured approximately
3 - 5 dB larger than the noise power as the empirical value.
b) DSP: The DSP modules are mainly designed to make
the system more robust against the wireless communication,
which is also the key requirement of the cognitive radio. The
entire base band signal processing block is implemented in
software on the general computer by C++ programming.
The subframe totally consists of fifteen OFDM symbols.
The guard interval (GI) is added in front of every OFDM
symbol to mitigate the effects of inter symbol interference
(ISI) caused by channel time spread. Among one subframe,
the first OFDM symbol is the reference signal for channel
estimation and also acts as synchronization symbol for timing
and frequency synchronization. In the current testbed, The
Zadoff-Chu sequence is chosen for the reference signals and
synchronization sequence, which has the immunity to large
frequency offset for synchronization and const amplitude for
272
 Reconfigure Spectrum
Spectrum Usage Sensing
Channel
Source CRC Framing
Coding
Channel
Sink CRC DeFraming
Decoding
Fig. 5. Basic block diagram of the TXRX signal chain used for secondary user.
16 bits 5 bits
CRC RB--tag Data bits
Fig. 7. Structure of the Resource Block.
channel estimation.
In order to dynamically and easily reconfigure the subcarri-
ers of the OFDM to avoiding the interfering the primary users
when they occupy some frequency band, we divide the entire
available frequency (2448-2452MHz) band into five parts,
marked f1 , f2 ...f5 , corresponding to five Resource Block
(RB) of the OFDM system, Each Resource Block contains
about 20 subcarriers in our case.
All the DSP modules are implemented independently as the
unit of Resource Block. And each Resource Block is added
16 bits CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) code and RB-tag
before the data bits. CRC is used to check the data bits in
each Resource Block in one frame, and if the CRC check
demonstrate the data bits of the Resource Block is error, and
discard the whole frame. 5 bits RB-tag is attached to the data
bit, which signs the state of the usage of the Resource Blocks.
When the receiver get the frame data, it can extract the data
bits according to the RB-tag. Fig. 7 shows the structure of the
Resource Block.
The channel coding in this system is convolutional code.
The generator polynomials is selected as g(0) = 0133,
g(1) = 0171 for the constraint length of 7 and the code rate of
1/2. In order to make the system more robust in severe wireless
channel, constraint length of 9 and turbo coding may be
implemented as our alternative in future. Furthermore, due to
the high complexity of the viterbi decoding, we chose a SIMD
(Single Instruction Multiple Data) optimized decoder from
Phil Karn to accelerate the processing speed [13]. The Karns
viterbi decoder can reach up to 22 Mbps information bit rate
for 1/2 rate and the constraint length of 7 on the 3.0 GHz CPU.
When the constraint length is 9, the maximum throughput is
4 Mbps. This decoder greatly reduces the program execution
time.
2) The MAC Layer: Above the physical layer, data packets
are re-segmented and some additional information is added to
these packets. For example, at our simplified MAC layer, data
packets from upper layer (IP packets) are split into smaller
units then the header is added. The packetizing procedure can
OFDM Pulse
USRP TX
Modulaton Shaping
OFDM
Synchronization AGC USRP RX
Demodulation
5 byte
BOP
Source Data Packet
Data Unit
Zero Padding
Fig. 8. Packetization from MAC layer to PHY layer.
be simplified because the scenario in our experiment is simple.
At the transmitter side, the PHY layer receives the IP packet
from upper layer, and then the packet will be divided into
smaller data units which are the payload of one radio frame.
The data units need to divide again to the proper size that is
the payload by one Resource Block. These divided data units
are then channel coded, modulated and put into radio frames
which are transmitted into air. At the receiver side, an inverse
process is done to recover the source data. Thus, after the
signal is decoded into data units, they should be combined
into IP packets and delivered to the data sink. To facilitate the
data unit combination, the BOP (Begin of Packet) tag for a
source packet is added at the beginning of IP packet as shown
in Fig. 8. The format of BOP tag is a 3-byte string followed by
2-byte packet size (unsigned short). When the size of source
packet is not multiple of the size of data unit, the padding bits
will be inserted at the tail[6].
As for the communication mode between SA and SB, we
deploy a novel semiduplex schemethe simplified CSMA
protocol[12]. In our testbed we assumed that primary users
want to communication with each other occupying the const
frequency band of f2 and f4 . The assumption is commonly
seen in real wireless communication and is reasonable in our
case. Secondary users can occupy the remaining frequency
band. In this simplified protocol, when SA station wants
to transmit, it senses the channel with the algorithm of
energy detection described above. If it is idle, it just starts
transmitting with the usage of five all Resource Blocks. If
only the frequency band of f2 and f4 are occupied, it just
starts transmitting with the usage of the remaining three
frequency band. If the channel is busy, the sender defers until
it goes idle and then starts transmitting. If a collision occurs,
the colliding stations wait a random time, using the Ethernet
binary exponential backoff algorithm, and then try again later.
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Fig. 9. Power spectral density of received QPSK signalPrimary user A
and Primary user B with the transmission mode of frequency-division-duplex
scheme ).
Fig. 10. Power spectral density of received primary (QPSK) and secondary
user (OFDM) signals coexisting in the same frequency band between the
primary and secondary users.
IV. T EST S CENARIOS AND P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS
In our experimental study, we used the testbed to demon-
strate the spectral sensing access and coexistence. PA and
PB act as the role of priority users, which are configured as
QPSK at different frequency center. Fig. 9 shows the PSD
of the primary user QPSK signal with no other users/services
in the same frequency range observed from the Monitor. SA
and SB reconfigure to take advantage of this estimate of the
unused frequencies, on either side of the primary user QPSK
signal by changing the subcarriers (resource blocks) employed
in the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing stage in
the transmit signal chain. Fig. 10 shows the reconfigurable
OFDM signal occupying unused spectrum on either side of
the primary user QPSK signal. The QPSK signal in this
case was received with less than 1% packets error in a test
according to the CRC check in the receiver side. Packets error
occurs due to the interference of the secondary users and other
unknown interference source operated in the open frequency
band around 2450MHz, and also due to the latency of the
energy detection, etc.
V. C ONCLUSION
These results concern the abilities of different software-
defined radio (SDR) and cognitive radio (CR) systems to
coexist in common frequency bands. Initial analysis of co-
existence experiences involving primary users and secondary
opportunistic spectrum users in a common frequency band
have also been presented. In our case, interfere-free case
was present, but sometimes the primary users and secondary
users are always interfere with each other, which will be
our future investigation. Furthermore, other spectrum sensing
algorithms such as cyclostationary feature detection algorithm,
are investigated now in our testbed for their robustness against
the noise and interference.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This material is based upon work supported by Wireless
Signal Processing and Network Lab, Beijing Universality of
Posts and telecommunications, Beijing, China. The opinions,
findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are
those of the authors. We would like to thank Lin Huang, Kan
Zheng for helping us the accomplishment of this novel testbed.
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