Cooperative spectrum occupancy measurements in the 2.4 GHz ISM band

Abstract

This paper presents cooperative spectrum occupancy measurements in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Spectrum occupancy describes the efficiency of spectrum use in terms of the proportion of time that the bands are occupied. In this paper, spectrum occupancy is measured from two measurement devices with several directional antennas. The spectrum occupancy information obtained from the different antennas and measurement devices is combined using techniques known from the cooperative spectrum sensing research for future cognitive radio systems. We introduce a new metric, the cooperative spectrum occupancy, to characterize the resulting spectrum occupancy that is obtained by combining the occupancy measurements from the antennas with different combining techniques, such as AND, OR, and majority combining rules. Since the transmission power levels at ISM band are low to allow efficient frequency reuse, the resulting spectrum occupancies are heavily dependent on the measurement location. Instead of averaging out the influence of the spatial dimension, the new metric can give more insights into the actual spectrum occupancy in a given area taking into account the spatial dimension.