BER performance maintenance at high data rates in cognitive radio

Abstract

Increased demand on the usable Spectrum and its current underutilization by the licensed users has given birth to dynamic spectrum allocation technology. This booming technology of dynamic spectrum allocation, popularly known as cognitive radio has setup new horizons in the field, to explore and to work on. Cognitive radio is envisioned as the ultimate system that can sense, adapt and learn from the environment in which it operates. Sensing the higher bandwidth an SDR (Software defined radio) in a Cognitive System, tunes the circuits in the System for transferring data at higher data rates. At such increased data rates the BER (Bit Error Rate) performance may degrade. So it is a must for the SDR to accordingly add processing circuits to maintain the BER. One such option has been explored and worked on. It is by using the FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum technique) that one can maintain the BER performance at increased data rates. Earlier work includes the use of higher bandwidth available for increasing the coding bits and thereby making the data more secure. In other words availability of higher bandwidth in Cognitive radio can be utilized either to increase the actual data rate (Yet maintain the BER) or to improve the BER performance & maintain the original data rate. Results of FHSS implementation by Matlab M-file programming and improved BER performance by adaptive coder both have been depicted in the paper. In fact present paper is an outcome of the doctoral research on Error Control Coding for performance improvement in BER.