Development and Demonstration of Graphical User Interface Spectrum Sensing Algorithm using some Wireless Systems in South Africa

Abstract

The wireless communication industry using radio spectrum is recently going through major innovations and advancements. With this transformation, the demand for and usage of radio spectrum has increased exponentially making radio spectrum indeed a scarce natural resource. In order to solve this problem, the possibility of opening up the unused portions of licensed spectrum by sharing using cognitive radio technology has been in the spotlight for maximizing radio spectrum utilization as well to as ensure sufficient radio spectrum availability for future wireless services and applications. With this objective in mind, this paper looks at the principles and technologies of cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio environment in improving radio spectrum utilization. The paper provides a comprehensive review on spectrum sensing as a key functional requirement for cognitive radio technology by focusing on its application on dynamic spectrum access that enables unused portions of licensed spectrum to be used in an opportunistic manner as long as the operation of the unlicensed user will not affect that of the licensed user. In satisfying this dynamic spectrum access requirement, a friendly interactive graphical user interface (GUI) spectrum sensing application program was developed. The detail activities involve in the development of the application program, also known as spectrum sensing and detection algorithm (SSADA), was fully documented and presented in the paper. The developed graphical user interface application program after successfully developed was evaluated. The performance evaluations of developed graphical user interface sensing algorithm show that the algorithm performs favourably well. The program overall evaluation results provide bedrock information on how to improve cooperative spectrum sensing gain without incurring a cooperative overhead.