Design of a Robust Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) Transceiver for a Cognitive Radio Testbed

Abstract

Primarily, a Cognitive Radio (CR) resolves the problem of spectrum scarcity and underutilization. However, it should also attain a good throughput and Quality of Service (QoS) as its objectives. These requirements are solely dependent on the modulation used. Though single carrier modulations such as Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) are highly spectral efficient, they are not robust to frequency selective fading. An implementation of multicarrier modulation supports high spectral efficiency and resistance to multipath fading. Therefore, in this paper, there is a comprehensive how-to-guide of the design of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in cognitive radio using GNU Radio (GR) 3.8 that interfaces with Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) B210s for video transmission. The implementation achieved allows for the choice of any modulation schemes out of four commonly used ones for communication of the payloads thus offering dynamism for use in a cognitive radio system. The effective implementation of the proposed methods in this paper is verified by the successful transmission and reception of a 4 minute 37 seconds MP4 video across the different choices of modulation schemes. It was observed that the error performance of the payloads degraded with higher constellation points however, the throughput was increased. Hence, the trade-off between error probability and throughput in the cognitive radio is based on the radio-scene metrics about the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the available channels.