The WiMedia UWB radio: Is it the ideal cognitive radio processor?

The area of cognitive radio has become an active research area; it promises a new paradigm in spectrum policy because it shifts the management of spectrum from being a political process at the national and world level to a set of algorithms that manage the airwaves around a more limited area. This is attractive because it allows much better spectrum reuse and spatial capacity. One of the primary requirements for cognitive spectral management is assessment of activity in a given frequency band; for maximal frequency reuse with minimal interference, the spectrum processor must assess the signal to interference ratio of a "preferred" signal with respect to a "shared" signal that interferes with it. In this paper, we analyze the theoretical performance of the WiMedia multiband-OFDM UWB receiver as a cognitive spectral processor (radiometer) in the presence of interference, show actual measured data, and explore future research such as cyclostationary processing that could avoid some of the limitations of a radiometer based approach by exploiting the periodic properties of a desired signal.