Volume 70, Issue 7-8 - Special Issue: Cognitive Radio, Guest editor: Rolf Kraemer

Wireless radio communications systems form the basis for mobile network connections in the digital society. A limited amount of radio spectrum and a spatially densified use of wireless communications systems require a resource-efficient use of the spectrum. Mechanisms of cognitive radio may hold the key to a more efficient use of the available spectrum under consideration of quality of service requirements. These mechanisms take advantage of location-specific knowledge of the wireless channel occupation in the dimensions of frequency, time, location and direction in space and therefore enable co-existent and reliable wireless communication. The authors give an introduction to the status of cognitive wireless communication technology, which represents the starting point of a series of research projects promoted by BMBF during 2012–2014.

We suggest an interweave cognitive radio system with a gray space detector , which is properly identifying a small fraction of unused resources within an active band of a primary user system like 3GPP LTE. Therefore, the gray space detector can cope with frequency fading holes and distinguish them from inactive resources. Different approaches of the gray space detector are investigated, the conventional reduced–rank least squares method as well as the compressed sensing–based orthogonal matching pursuit and basis pursuit denoising algorithm. In addition, the gray space detector is compared with the classical energy detector. Simulation results present the receiver operating characteristic at several SNRs and the detection performance over further aspects like base station system load for practical false alarm rates. The results show, that especially for practical false alarm rates the compressed sensing algorithm are more suitable than the classical energy detector and reduced–rank least squares approach.

Mobile broadband networks will face a tremendous growth in data traffic demand over the next 20 years. A key requirement for the evolution of radio access networks is the increase in the amount of spectrum and optimized spectrum usage, in order to meet future service demands. More efficient spectrum use will come with evolving technology features and novel spectrum sharing models. Candidates for technology improvements are higher order and massive MIMO systems, cooperative base stations and CoMP techniques, highly optimized resource allocation algorithms, network densification with inter-cell interference management and highly flexible carrier aggregation techniques to extend spectrum. In this paper, we will highlight carrier aggregation combined with flexible spectrum assignment and use of spectrum databases following novel licensing schemes. We give an overview of LSA activities, present a 3CA demonstration platform enabling the LSA concept and discuss its implementation constraints.

This paper considers eigenvalue estimation for the decentralized inference problem for spectrum sensing. We propose a decentralized eigenvalue computation algorithm based on the power method, which is referred to as generalized power method GPM; it is capable of estimating the eigenvalues of a given covariance matrix under certain conditions. Furthermore, we have developed a decentralized implementation of GPM by splitting the iterative operations into local and global computation tasks. The global tasks require data exchange to be performed among the nodes. For this task, we apply an average consensus algorithm to efficiently perform the global computations. As a special case, we consider a structured graph that is a tree with clusters of nodes at its leaves. For an accelerated distributed implementation, we propose to use computation over multiple access channel (CoMAC) as a building block of the algorithm. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the performance of the two algorithms.

An in-depth treatment of impulse an radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) wireless system is provided reviewing theoretical background, proceeding with detailed implementation procedure, and finally giving simulation and test results. This is the first research and prototyping work to be published in the field of IR-UWB that operates in the 6–8 GHz band. The aim of this work is to implement an IR-UWB wireless system for industrial automation that is robust and reliable. To achieve this, an analogue bandwidth of 250 MHz and digital baseband processing at the clock frequency 499.2 MHz were realized in a 250 nm BiCMOS process, integrating the complete system into a single chip. Simulation and measurement results confirm that the implemented IR-UWB transceiver is operational across four frequency channels in the band 6–8 GHz each supporting three data rates 850 kb/s, 6.81 Mb/s and 27.24 Mb/s.

Wireless sensor networks for industrial communication require high reliability and low latency. As current wireless sensor networks do not entirely meet these requirements, novel system approaches need to be developed. Since ultra wideband communication systems seem to be a promising approach, this paper evaluates the performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 impulse-radio ultra-wideband physical layer and the IEEE 802.15.4 Low Latency Deterministic Network (LLDN) MAC for industrial applications. Novel approaches and system adaptions are proposed to meet the application requirements. In this regard, a synchronization approach based on circular average magnitude difference functions (CAMDF) and on a clean template (CT) is presented for the correlation receiver. An adapted MAC protocol titled aggregated low latency (ALL) MAC is proposed to significantly reduce the resulting latency. Based on the system proposals, a hardware prototype has been developed, which proves the feasibility of the system and visualizes the real-time performance of the MAC protocol.

Cognitive Cellular Systems are seen today as one of the most promising ways of moving forward solving or at least easing the still worsening situation of congested spectrum caused by the growing number of users and the expectation of higher data transfer rates. As the intelligence of a Cognitive Radio system is located in the digital domain – the Cognitive Engine and associated layers – extensive research has been ongoing in that domain since Mitola published his idea in 1999. Since, a big progress has been made in the domain of architectures and algorithms making systems more efficient and highly flexible. The pace of this progress, however, is going to be impeded by hard requirements on the received and transmitted signal quality, introducing ultimate challenges on the performance of the RF analog frontend, such as in-band local oscillator harmonics, ultra low sensitivity and ultra high linearity. The RF frontend is thus likely to become the limiting technical factor in the true realization of a Cognitive Cellular System. Based on short recapitulations of the most crucial issues in RF analog design for Cognitive Systems, this article will point out why those mechanisms become responsible for the limitation of the overall performance particularly in a broadband Cognitive Cellular System. Furthermore, as part of a possible solution to ease the situation, system design of a high intermediate frequency (IF) to UHF frequency converter for cognitive radios is discussed and the performance of such a converter analyzed as a proof of concept. In addition to successfully tackling some of the challenges, such a high-IF converter enables white space operation for existing commercial devices by acting as frequency converter. From detailed measurements, the capabilities in both physical layer and application layer performance of a high-IF frontend developed out of off-the-shelf components is explained and is shown to provide negligible degradation to the commercial device being connected to.

Advent of TV white space digitization has released frequencies from 470 MHz to 790 MHz to be utilized opportunistically. The secondary user can utilize these so called TV spaces in the absence of primary users. The most important challenge for this coexistence is mutual interference. While the strong TV stations can completely saturate the receiver of the cognitive radio (CR), the cognitive radio spurious tones can disturb other primary users and white space devices. The aim of this paper is to address the challenges for enabling cognitive radio applications in WLAN and LTE. In this process, architectural considerations for the design of cognitive radio front ends are discussed. With high-IF converters, faster and flexible implementation of CR enabled WLAN and LTE are shown. The effectiveness of the architecture is shown by evaluating the CR front ends for compliance of standards namely 802.11b/g (WLAN) and 3GPP TS 36.101 (LTE).