CHANNEL AND SPECTRUM ESTIMATION FOR SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO

Abstract

Software defined radios are rapidly increasing in both research and commercial usage for many different applications. As the number of deployed systems increase, a difficult problem that remains is efficient usage of the Radio-Frequency (RF) spectrum to be shared among all these devices. Two key tasks for the radio to perform here include spectral estimation of the RF environment and channel estimation of the communication channel for which the data will be transmitted. These two steps are linked as the communication channel can change over different portions of the RF-spectrum. In this work, an algorithmic approach is presented for passive and active channel estimation procedures for wideband software-defined radios. The algorithm is comprised of first channel quality estimation followed by communication channel planning to optimize the overall performance.