Practical implementation of efficient cyclostationarity based detectors for Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA)

Spectrum sensing provides detailed information on the occupancy in a given spectrum band. Practical implementations of spectrum sensing techniques are crucial to gaining complete comprehension of their performance and applicability. Hardware limitations significantly impact the performance of the sensing techniques. This paper presents a cyclostationarity based detection testbed, which incorporates commercially available equipment, i.e. a signal analyzer and a USRP2 device and uses three modified and enhanced detectors: region cycle, multi cycle max and region cycle max in addition to the traditional detectors. These detectors provide the best results derived from practical measurements at reduced processing complexity. Additionally, the paper investigates the impact of various parameters settings on the performance. An optimal choice of detector and parameters, for a given application, can significantly improve the performance or reduce the processing complexity of a spectrum sensing practical implementation based on cyclostationarity.