A scalable dynamic spectrum allocation system with interference mitigation for teams of spectrally agile software defined radios

Abstract

In future applications, next generation spectrally agile software defined radios (SASDR) will be equipped with advanced radio frequency (RF) sensors that will enable them to sense their environment and adaptively select the best and most stable portions of the spectrum to establish communications. This paper presents a robust method for estimating locally the unused or underutilized regions of RF spectrum to optimize dynamic spectrum usage. These adaptive algorithms are described and results of "open spectrum" estimation performed on real RF spectrum measurements illustrate the robust performance of the approach. Simulation results are shown along with results from real measurements that describe the RF resources in rural, suburban and urban areas in and around Philadelphia in the VHF and UHF bands. The measurements represent a good dynamic data set including motion and spatio-temporal diversity. The effect on reducing the risk of interference by collaborating across multiple nodes that provides increased robustness of sensing of open spectrum through spatial diversity is also discussed and quantitative values for the interference mitigation under collaborative behaviors are also presented