Feature

Spectrum
Sharing Radios
Danijela Cabric,
Ian D. O’Donnell,
Mike Shuo-Wei Chen,
and Robert W. Brodersen

Abstract
A major shift in radio design is now
just beginning which attempts to
share spectrum in a fundamentally
new way. These radios are addressing
the fact that spectrum is actually
poorly utilized in many bands, in spite
of the increasing demand for wireless
connectivity.
The new approaches to spectrum
sharing make use of the advances in
technology to implement new wire-
less systems that can share previously
allocated spectra in such a way that
the primary users of these spectra
are not affected. Additionally, the
allowed use of this band is on an unli-
censed basis. Two methods that are
being investigated to accomplish
this task are the use of Ultra Wide-
band transmission and Cognitive
techniques.
Ultra Wideband transmission
relies on the fact that if the band-
width is increased, that reliable data
transmission can occur even at power
levels so low that primary radios in
the same spectral bands are not
© STOCKBYTE, 2001 i SWOOP, LTD.,
PHOTODISC

affected. On the other hand the Cog-

nitive approach does not necessarily
limit the transmission power, but
rather attempts to share the spectra
through a dynamic avoidance strategy.
The opportunities and challenges of
this new era in radio design will be
described along with the open ques-
tions in their implementation.

30 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 1531-6364/06/$20.00©2006 IEEE SECOND QUARTER 2006
 Spectrum Sharing
T
he increasing demand for wireless connectivity
and current crowding of unlicensed spectra has
pushed the regulatory agencies to be more
aggressive in providing new ways to use spectra. In the
past, the approach for spectrum allocation was based
on specific band assignments designated for a particular
service, as illustrated by the Federal Communications
Commission’s (FCC) frequency allocation chart Figure 1
[1]. The spectrum chart contains overlapping alloca-
tions in most frequency bands and seems to indicate a
high degree of spectrum utilization. However, while the
spectral efficiency of some radio systems is continually
improving (e.g., cell phone and WiFi bands), they are
faced with increasing interference that limits network
capacity and scalability. The FCC Spectrum Policy Task
Force [2] reported vast temporal and geographic varia-
tions in the usage of allocated spectrum with utilization
ranging from 15% to 85% in the bands below 3 GHz. In
the frequency range above 3 GHz the bands are even
more poorly utilized as shown by the measurements
shown in Figure 2. These were taken in downtown Berke-
United
States
Frequency
Allocations
The Radio Spectrum
Figure 1. FCC spectrum allocation chart.
Danijela Cabric, Ian D. O’Donnell, Mike Shuo-Wei Chen, and Robert W. Brodersen are with the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, University
of California, Berkeley. E-mail: danijela@eecs.berkeley.edu
SECOND QUARTER 2006
ley, California and also reveal a typical utilization of
roughly 30% below 3 GHz and only 0.5% in the 3–6 GHz
frequency band. This inefficiency arises from the inflex-
ibility of the regulatory and licensing process, which
typically assigns the complete rights to a frequency
band to a primary user. This approach makes it extreme-
ly difficult to recycle these bands once they are allocat-
ed, even if these users poorly utilize this valuable
resource. A solution to this inefficiency, which has been
highly successful in the ISM (2.4 GHz) and UNII (5–6
GHz) and microwave (57–64 GHz) bands, is to make
spectra available on an unlicensed basis. However, in
order to obtain spectra for unlicensed operation, new
sharing concepts have been introduced to allow use by
secondary users under the requirement that they limit
their interference to pre-existing primary users.
Two basic approaches to spectrum sharing have
been identified as worthy of investigation and some reg-
ulatory freedom. One is an underlay approach with
severe restrictions on transmitted power levels with a
requirement to operate over “ultra” wide bandwidths
(Ultra Wideband or UWB) and the other is an overlay
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 31
 approach based on avoidance of higher priority users previously used bands as a power level that was suffi-
through the use of spectrum sensing and adaptive allo- ciently low that the interference is felt to be not harm-
cation (Cognitive Radios or CR). Both of these tech- ful, and the overlay strategy which vacates the space
niques are a major shift from the long standing (time, frequency or spatial) sufficiently fast to only
approach that once a frequency band is assigned no yield allowable interference. Figure 3 illustrates the
interference is allowed to the primary user, in spite of transmitter power spectrum density profiles in under-
the fact that it is clearly not possible to insure absolute- lay and overlay spectrum sharing approaches.
ly “no” interference. The transition to the use of requir- This regulatory shift has also major implications on
ing that a sharing radio system yield no harmful radio architectures since traditional narrowband radio
interference is the critical step. This then allows the design techniques are not applicable. Spectrum sharing
underlay approach, where a transmission is allowed in required in UWB and CR over wide bands implies fre-
quency agility and significant
dynamic range improvements
to accommodate the in-band
primary users. In addition, new
radio functions are required
which involve high sensitivity
sensing and protocols that can
exploit this sensing information
to minimize interference. Even
more interesting is that entirely
new signaling strategies may be
employed, since the combina-
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 GHz
tion of ultra wide bandwidth
Figure 2. Spectrum utilization measurement in 0–6 GHz band. availability and severe power
restrictions were not present
before. Finally, new application
areas may be facilitated such as
ranging and imaging in addition
to communications.
Power Spectrum Density

In this paper, we present

Primary User
Underlay Ultra Wideband
major opportunities and chal-
Transmission lenges of this new era in CMOS
radio design by focusing on
Power Spectrum
Density Mask some of the issues raised by
these new sharing strategies.
Radio architectures that address
the unique new requirements of
(a) Frequency these radios will be discussed
including the analog and digital
Overlay Cognitive Radio circuit partitioning, and the
Transmission issues involved in protocols and
Power Spectrum Density

Primary User signal processing.

Ultra-Wide Band Radios

Ultra-Wideband, as an under-
lay technology, is a simple,
conservative approach to
sharing. By fixing the transmit
power to a sufficiently low
(b) Frequency level the impact to pre-existing
spectrum users is limited. In
Figure 3. (a) Underlay and (b) Overlay approach for sharing spectrum with primary users.
fact the level was set to be

32 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE SECOND QUARTER 2006

equivalent to the previously allowed unintentional
transmission from electronic devices such as a PC (i.e.,
<40 uW/500 MHz). Since the only difference from the PC
noise emission was to allow data to be modulated onto
the emission, it seemed reasonable to allow this new
underlay use. Of course, even this conservative
approach caused much concern, as any change in spec-
trum policy always does and after inclusion of protec-
tion for the particularly sensitive GPS receivers, this
new approach opened bands from 0–960 MHz, 23.6 to 24
GHz and from 3.1–10.6 GHz to a variety of new uses in
2002. To encourage new technical approaches, the FCC
has restricted the minimum occupied bandwidth to a
500 MHz minimum bandwidth [3] and identified appli-
cations in three main areas as appropriate for the 3
bands that were:
1) Imaging Systems (including through-wall, medical,
and surveillance systems.) in 0–960 MHz, and
1.99–10.6 GHz
2) Vehicular RADAR (23.6–24 GHz)
3) Communication and measurement (3.1–10.6 GHz)
These applications take advantage of the bandwidth to
perform ranging or imaging, transmit at very high data
rates, or reduce implementation costs by facilitating inte-
gration and reducing power consumption. While the large
bandwidth required for UWB operation suggests high
throughput, the low transmit power drastically limits
transmit distances for high-rate communication, making
this approach suitable only for short range applications
such as Wireless Personal Area Networks, WPAN, or
“Wireless USB,” or for short to medium range, but at a
lower rate (i.e., sensor networks).
Present commercial attention is focused on short-
range, high data rate consumer applications, as
expressed in the 802.15.3a standard; targeting 110, 200,
and 480 Mbps communication links over 1 to 10 m [4].
The development of this standard has been quite con-
tentious, with two basic approaches being proposed.
One approach is based on OFDM over the minimum 500
MHz bandwidth, such as used in 802.11a and 802.11g
with the addition of frequency hopping to provide a
way to avoid large interfering signals and allow higher
transmit power levels. The advantage of this approach
is this modulation scheme is well understood and the
diversity provided by spreading the data over the sub-
channels gives additional robustness against primary
users. On the other hand, others have promoted a tech-
nique that is made possible by the wideband frequency
allocation with a novel type of signaling which makes
use of impulses to carry information. This approach
which is best analyzed in the time domain has unique
implementation issues and provides an alternative
implementation to the OFDM strategy.
SECOND QUARTER 2006
In addition to these short-range, high-throughput
applications, UWB is also being considered for lower rate,
medium range systems such as sensor networks which
require ultra low-power communication and desire the
ability to do precise ranging with scalable, but low, data
rates. 802.15.4a targets a physical layer radio suitable for
ranges up to 30 m maximum with data rates from a few
kbps to 1 to 10 Mbps and ranging accuracy from 1m to
around 10’s of cm [5] and an impulse-based UWB design
is being specified as an alternative physical layer for this
standard. Ranging may be implemented simply by using
time-of-flight, given the fine time resolution of impulse-
UWB, and power consumption and cost is expected to be
lower due to the duty-cycled nature of pulse communica-
tion and high-levels of integration possible.
As the FCC has only specified the spectral mask for
UWB, leaving the implementation details open, there is
an enormous, unexplored space for Ultra-Wideband
radio architectures in addition to the standards efforts
mentioned above. Two exciting directions of UWB
research are:
1) ultra low power consumption
2) high rate, low power communication
We will briefly examine implementation issues, out-
lining the specifications and repercussions of Ultra-
Wideband signaling with a particular focus on unique
aspects of impulse signaling.
Ultra Low Power Consumption
By using a baseband (0–960 MHz), pulse-based, ultra-
wideband signaling it is possible to approach a “fully-
digital” and hence fully-integrated, radio; taking
advantage of the technology scaling of CMOS to reduce
both the transmit power and receiver’s analog com-
plexity beyond what may be achieved through simply
scaling a narrowband transceiver. By moving A/D con-
version as close to the antenna as is feasible (post
matching and gain), the signal is directly sampled and
processed digitally. This eliminates the need for fre-
quency translation and synthesis and removes external
filtering and components as would be needed for a nar-
rowband radio. Also, due to the pulse-based nature of
signaling, further power may be saved by duty-cycling
the analog circuitry: activating only when we are
receiving a pulse [6]. A target application for such a
radio would be a sensor network, having a cell-size of 3
to 10 meters with data-rates variable from 100 kbps to
1 Mbps at 1e-3 BER with total power consumption of
the order of 1 mW/Mbps.
An interesting consequence of using Ultra-Wideband
signaling is that the A/D conversion precision may be low,
while the conversion rate is high, on the order of a
GigaSample/s. Because transmit power is limited, and
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 33
 Example Interference: SNIR / Pulse:
15
3-b
FCC UWB Limit 2-b
−50 10
1-b
5
−60

SNIR for One Pulse (dB)

Spectral Energy
0
−70
−5
dBm/MHz

1-b A/D is Adequate

for Received Signal
−80 −10 Energy> −60dBm Post
Template Correlation.
−90 −5

−20 Also Implies Noise

−100 Figure Requirements
−25 are not Stringent.
−110
−30
−120 −35
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 −100 −90 −80 −70 −60 −50 −40 −30 −20
Frequency ×108 Interference Power (dBm)

Figure 4. Interference power spectral density over 0–960 MHz and Impact of A/D converter resolution in such an interference-
dominated environment.

TIA GAIN GAIN GAIN GAIN BUF PULSE

OSC A/D A/D A/D A/D

Control
CLK
Delay Locked Loop
GEN
Voltage

Sample Time Time

Reception
Window
Pulse Transmission Rate
Operation
Receiver

Analog On Analog Off Analog Off Analog On

Sampling On Sampling Off Sampling Off Sampling On
Digital Off Digital On Digital Off Digital Off

Time

Figure 5. Block diagram of ultra-low power baseband, impulse-UWB transceiver front-end and illustration of duty-cycled operation.

34 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE SECOND QUARTER 2006

relatively large interferers are likely to be present, the occurs when a correlation value exceeds the peak
resulting channel is interference-dominated, as opposed threshold. Synchronization is maintained by looking only
to thermal noise dominated. In such an environment, at three correlators outputs for ‘early,’ ‘on-time,’ and ‘late’
there is no benefit to sampling with high resolution if we correlation values. All other correlators and filters are
are not attempting to cancel interference, and analysis shutdown to save power.
indicates that adequate throughput is still possible even The analog front-end chip has been fabricated and
with a 1-bit ADC. The ADC simplification saves substantial tested. It occupies 2.5 mm2 of active area in a 0.13 µm
power, without severely degrading system performance. CMOS process, consuming 4 mW when fully active.
Shown in Figure 4 is a measured plot of the power spec- Through duty-cycling the analog circuitry at the pulse
tral density (relative to the UWB emission limits) and the rate, the power decreases below 1 mW. A die photo is
resulting impact on system A/D resolution requirements. shown in Figure 7. The digital backend chip occupies
To compensate for inherently low incoming SNR, data 245,000 cells in 10 mm2 in 0.13 µm CMOS and will con-
rate may also be traded off for distance by employing a sume an estimated 12 mW during acquisition and 1.5 mW
spreading code over the pulse transmission. Additionally, while tracking for a 10 MPulses/s pulse transmission rate.
due to the large in-band interference, the design con-
straints on the input “low noise” amplifier may be relaxed High Rate, Low Power Communication
without affecting system performance allowing for more For high rate indoor UWB communications, two com-
noisy, but less power hungry circuitry whose main task is peting approaches based on time-frequency hopping
to match impedances with the antenna. OFDM and the impulse radio technique with direct
The front-end analog block diagram and an illustration sequence coding are being considered. The OFDM sig-
of its duty-cycled operation are shown in Figure 5. The naling strategy is essentially a scaled-up version of an
antenna is matched to a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) 802.11a/g system, which has the benefit of combating
providing 10 dB of gain followed by four variable gain multipaths, and potential power allocation for optimiz-
amplifiers (VGA) that provide from 10 to 40 dB of total ing channel capacity. A major challenge of this
gain before being buffered and driven into a bank of 32 approach is that the overall complexity is on the order
parallel slicers (1-bit A/D Converters). Parallelizing the of present 802.11 systems, which means that an oppor-
A/D operation allows for slower operation from a single tunity for dramatic cost and power reductions are
crystal oscillator at 60 MHz. Sampling clock phases for unlikely. For example on the transmitter side, a wide-
each slicer are generated from a 32-tap delay line in a band OFDM radio requires high-speed digital-to-analog
Delay-Locked Loop (DLL) tied to the crystal-reference converter, up-conversion mixers, oscillators and power
clock. Sampled data is re-aligned and fed to the digital amplifier with some degree of linearity and peak-to-aver-
backend through a 32-bit bus. The digital backend imple- age ratio (PAR) constraints because of the multicarrier
ments (Figure 6) a bank of template filters with 128 pro- transmission [7]. On the other hand, an impulse radio
grammable coefficients whose outputs are correlated simply uses a pulser to drive the antenna, and radiates
against a programmable spreading sequence. Acquisition a passband pulse (between 3.1–10.6 GHz) shaped by the
φ[i−10]

... 128xMF_Coeff[4.0] ...

φ[i−1]

PN_Coeff[i:i−10] To Analog
...
0
254:127 ... 28.1 127:0

φ[−1]
12

PN CORR0
Matched
Input_Reg[255:0]

Filter1

12

PN CORR1
Control
Detect
Peak
...
126

...

...
12

PN CORR126
Matched
Filter127

12

PN CORR127
254
225:128

PN CORR
Recovery
Late
Sync
Early

Data

PN CORR
Data Out
PN CORR

Figure 6. Digital backend implementation of an impulse-UWB radio.

SECOND QUARTER 2006 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 35

 response of the wideband antenna and potential band-
pass filters, as shown in Figure 8. The most popular
modulation schemes using this approach are antipodal
signaling or pulse position modulation, which have dra-
matically reduced linearity requirements.
The 3–10 GHz impulse radio architecture proposed in
[8] reduces the complexity on the receiver side to save
cost and power. Instead of the conventional heterodyne
topology utilizing one or two mixing stages to down-
convert the passband signal, the proposed receiver
directly sub-samples the incoming signal after amplifica-
tion, by sampling at a rate below the Nyquist rate of the
RF signal, but at or above the Nyquist rate of the data
itself. It is the wideband nature of UWB signal that makes
sub-sampling front end practical, while narrowband sys-
tems would suffer great performance degradation due to
sub-sampling. The sampled and digitally converted data
are processed by an optimized digital matched filter for
optimal detection. The proposed system avoids wide-
band analog processing by adding more processing to
the digital backend, which results in a more efficient
solution. Specifically, the tighter timing sensitivity due to
sub-sampling front end is alleviated by digital analytic sig-
nal processing. The savings of front-end blocks include
frequency synthesizers, LO buffers, and mixers, etc. Most
of the state-of-the-art UWB front-end implementations
have adopted direct-conversion architectures [9]–[12].
According to the reported power numbers, the extra cir-
cuit blocks required by direct-conversion technique can
contribute at least several tens of milli-Watts.

Cognitive Radios
The idea of Cognitive Radios as an aggressive solution to
increase spectrum utilization was promoted in the Spec-
trum Policy Task Force report of the FCC in 2002 [2] and
the thesis of J. Mitola [13]. Unfortunately, there has not
been a clear definition of what actually constitutes a Cog-
nitive Radio. A relatively conservative definition would be
that a Cognitive Radio is network of radios that co-exists
with higher priority primary users, by sensing their pres-
ence and modifying its own transmission characteristics in
such a way that they do not yield any harmful interference.
It is this sensing function and ability to rapidly modify their
Figure 7. Chip plot of ultra-low power baseband, impulse-
transmitted waveform that is the unique characteristic and
UWB transceiver front-end.
challenge of Cognitive Radio implementation.

D
I
A A
UWB Antenna
C D
90° C
Shift PA 90° Digital
D Shift Backend
Bp Bp LNA
A A
C Q D
C

(a)

UWB Antenna
A
Pulser Digital
D
Backend
Bp C
Bp LNA

(b)

Figure 8. Transceiver of (a) one-stage heterodyne for OFDM approach (b) proposed sub-sampling impulse radio.

36 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE SECOND QUARTER 2006

 While at this time there are no Cognitive Radio net- and can (or will) not to be modified to allow oppor-
works in commercial deployment, the basic ideas have tunistic use of their spectra by Cognitive Radios. In
already been demonstrated. In the middle of the 5 GHz order to avoid causing interference to these primary
band of 802.11a, there are two 200 MHz wide bands users, Cognitive Radios must protect a specified geo-
(5150–5350 MHz and/or 5470–5725 MHz) which are graphic region, called a service contour, within which
shared with sensitive aeronautical navigation radars. primary receivers must not be degraded by Cognitive
While these radars have limited geographic distribu- Radio operation. Detecting the absence of primary
tion, it was deemed necessary to protect them from users, i.e., identifying the spectrum “white spaces” in
802.11a transmissions. A technique called Dynamic Fre- the particular geographic location, is solely Cognitive
quency Shifting is employed, which involves sensing if Radios’ responsibility. This requirement establishes a
a radar signal is present and then avoiding those fre- new type of functionality for spectrum sensing over
quency channels to avoid interference. While the rela- all available degrees of freedom (time, frequency, and
tively simplistic strategy of abandoning the impacted space) in order to identify frequency bands currently
802.11a frequency channels is far from optimal in terms available for transmission. Once unused spectrum
exploitation of the spectrum, it does indicate that the has been identified, Cognitive Radios must adaptively
regulators are willing to accept that spectrum can be control transmission power so that interference mar-
shared through sensing and avoidance. gin to any active primary user in the vicinity is not
There is also evidence that the regulators are willing exceeded. A scenario where two Cognitive Radio net-
to go even further and actually experiment with Cogni- works reuse two TV channel frequencies is depicted
tive Radio operation by allowing shared use in the dig- in Figure 9. In order to guarantee non-interference,
ital TV bands from 400–800 MHz [14]. This is hotly Cognitive Radios operate far beyond the service con-
contested now by the incumbent users (TV broadcast- tour. They can transmit at higher power levels, thus
ers), but it does seem clear some limited form of Cog- longer range, if located further away from the service
nitive Radio operation may be allowed. The primary contour. Since primary user signals decay with dis-
application being promoted is to use the long-range tance spectrum sensing for far away radios becomes
capability of the TV carrier frequencies to provide increasingly difficult. If benefits of higher power
internet access in rural areas. Furthermore, given the transmission are to be exploited together with mini-
static TV channel allocations, the timing requirements mum interference then reliable sensing becomes the
for spectrum sensing are very relaxed. most critical functionality of Cognitive Radios.
Another natural band to allow Cognitive Radio oper- In order to exploit vast spectrum opportunities needed
ation in is the same 3–10 GHz band that is already in use for high throughput applications Cognitive Radios will
by the Ultra Wideband radios.
This band is sufficiently wide that
the true advantages of Cognitive TV Transmitter Ch(A) TF Transmitter Ch(B)
Protected Radius
Radio operation could be demon- Ch(B)
strated and the simultaneous TV Receiver
Relia

availability of two approaches to Ch(B)

ble R

sharing could actually be mutual-

ly supportive.
ecep
tion

System Architecture
ing

TV Receiver
In this section we introduce a Se
ns

Ch(A) ns
ing
Se

system architecture that pro-

vides an approach to implement-
ing a Cognitive Radio network Protected Radius
Ch(A)
that yields a high system capaci-
ty, even in the presence of
dynamically varying primary Cognitive Network on Ch(B)

users [15]. Primary users are

entities that have a license to
operate in a frequency band
(e.g., cell phone provider, TV
station, emergency services)
Cognitive Network on Ch(A)
Figure 9. A scenario where two cognitive radio networks use TV channels on oppor-
tunistic basis without causing interference to protected TV receivers.

SECOND QUARTER 2006 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 37

 operate in a large spectrum pool covering a broad frequen-
cy range up to several GHz where different kinds of primary
users might be present. A spectrum pool can be divided
into sub-channels with sufficient resolution (on the order
from 10 kHz to 1 MHz) for sensing and channel assignment
coordination. Figure 10 illustrates an example of temporal
use of frequency bands on an opportunistic basis within a
spectrum pool with three active primary users in the par-
ticular location. Unoccupied primary user bands are shared
by three cognitive networks (A, B, C) that are simultane-
ously sensing and competing for the available spectrum
within the same spectrum pool. These networks could be
either centrally organized (base station/access point mode)
or distributed (ad-hoc mode), but in any case radio coop-
eration within the network is required to jointly perform
reliable sensing and coordinate communication.
Besides frequency agile opportunistic channel use for
data transmission, cognitive networks need dedicated
channels for the exchange of control and sensing infor-
mation to accommodate dynamic frequency band opera-
tion. Two different kinds of control channels, a Universal
Control Channel (UCC) and Group Control Channels
(GCCs) need to be maintained. The UCC is globally
unique, known to every Cognitive Radio a priori, whose
Time
Subchannels
Figure 10. A time-frequency spectrum usage patterns when cognitive users share bands with primary users.
38 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
main purpose is to allow co-existence of multiple cogni-
tive networks. The need for the UCC arises from the
requirement that while sensing the primary user band no
additional noise or interference should be added by near-
by cognitive users in order to achieve good sensitivity
measurement. In addition, mutual interference and band-
width allocation should be coordinated through agree-
ments on sharing strategies (e.g., time-division multiple
access, or carrier sense mechanisms) among different
groups. As a result, the UCC channel must cover larger
distances but its throughput requirement is fairly low. On
the other hand the GCC is set up to exchange sensing
information, perform channel allocation, and link mainte-
nance. It is local with one group and thus has a shorter
range but higher throughput. One approach would be to
use UWB signaling for the control channels, as it is non-
interfering channel access, where range could be traded
for data rate, and it is independent on primary bands’
occupancies. Figure 11 shows main physical and link
layer functionalities required for the implementation of
the presented system architecture.
In the next sections we will present system design con-
siderations for unique physical layer functions together with
architectural and circuit issues in their implementations.
Active Primary Cognitive Radio
User Band Network A
Unused Primary Cognitive Radio
User Band Network B
Cognitive Radio
Control Channels Network C
Spectrum Pool
Frequency
SECOND QUARTER 2006
New Physical Layer Functions Spectrum Sensing to shadowing and multipath at various locations, thus
Unique to Cognitive Radio operation is the requirement the sensitivity margin could be reduced if sensing
that the radio is able to sense the environment over huge measurements from different Cognitive Radios are
swaths of spectrum and adapt to it since the radio does combined. This network technique is referred as coop-
not have primary rights to any pre-assigned frequencies. erative sensing based on a control channel and proto-
This new radio functionality will involve the design of cols for user coordination.
various analog, digital, and network processing tech- Digital signal processing techniques could also be uti-
niques in order to meet challenging radio sensitivity lized to further increase radio sensitivity through
requirements [16].
In general, Cognitive Radio
sensitivity should outperform
primary user receiver by a large Link Layer
margin in order to prevent what
Medium
is essentially a hidden terminal User Channel
Access

Universal Control
Cooperation Assignment
Channel (GCC)

Channel (UCC)
problem. This margin is required
Group Control
Control
because Cognitive Radio does
not have a direct measurement
of a channel between primary
user receiver and transmitter Spectrum Channel Data
Sensing Estimation Transmission
and must base its decision on its
local channel measurement to a
PHY Layer
primary user transmitter. This
type of detection is referred to
Figure 11. Cognitive radio physical and link layer functionalities.
as local spectrum sensing and
the worst case hidden terminal
problem would occur when the
Cognitive Radio is shadowed, in
severe multipath fading, or
inside buildings with high pene- Threshold
tration loss while in a close
neighborhood there is a primary
user whose is at the marginal
reception, due to its more favor- x(t) Average Energy
A/D N pt. FFT
able channel conditions. For Over T Detect
example in the TV spectrum
reuse, the service contour is set (a)
by minimum required signal
strength equal to −83 dBm. In 0
order to protect a TV receiver
−5
an additional sensitivity margin
is set to account for shadowing −10
Magnitude, dB

(10 to 20 dB), multipath (20 dB),

antenna height and directionali- −15
ty variation (10 dB). In the −20
worst-case scenario, the Cogni-
tive Radio must detect signals at −25
−133 dBm = −83 dBm − (20 +
−30
20 + 10) dB. Since the noise
floor in 6 MHz wide TV channel −35
is −106 dBm, this operating con- −0.3 −0.2 −0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3
dition would result in SNR (b)
= −27 dB. However, there is a Figure 12. (a) An energy detector implementation and (b) example of its output.
variability of signal strength due

SECOND QUARTER 2006 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 39

 processing gain and provide primary user identification
based on knowledge of some signal characteristics. How-
ever, signal processing algorithms for very low SNRs in a
noise dominated regime are quite different from demodu-
lation and detection processing in conventional digital
communications. Furthermore, the demodulation and
decoding of the primary signal involves synchronization
and optimal coherent matched filtering which would be
difficult to achieve without knowledge of primary user
pilots, training sequences or preambles. Also, the goal is
not to decode the primary user signal. Another significant
difference is that in typical “above 0 dB” SNR regimes
coherent vs. non-coherent approaches usually incur a
3 dB loss, while in low SNRs the price of non-coherency
might mean impossible detection.
The simplest non-coherent detector is energy detector
which only integrates squared samples. The processing
gain for energy detectors [17] scales with number of
samples as: SNRout = N·S NRin 2 . In the case of a very small
SNR in quadratic scaling becomes dominant, and increas-
ing the observation time helps less. The signal is detect-
ed by comparing the output of the energy detector with a
threshold dependent on the estimated noise power (Fig-
ure 12). As a result, a small uncertainty in the noise power
due to estimation error or interference in the channel
could limit the detection of weak signals and even cause
the detector to fail. Even though the implementation sim-
plicity of the energy detector makes it a favorable candi-
date, practical challenges in noise power estimation and
variances of actual RF transceiver noise figures and chan-
nel interference prohibit the use of this detector in low
SNR regimes. Furthermore, this detector does not dis-
criminate the modulated signal energy versus noise and
interference energy.
x(t)
Correlate Average
A/D N pt. FFT
X(f+a)X*(f−a) Over T
X(k+m)
m={−M/2, M/2}
x(n) Sx α(f )
N FFT Z−1
X(I+m)*
(a)
Figure 13. (a) A feature detector implementation and (b) example of its output.
40 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
In order to overcome the weaknesses of energy detec-
tor, more sophisticated detectors could be devised if
additional information on primary user signal is exploited.
One example is cyclostationary feature detector [18] that
has the ability to extract distinct features of modulated
signals such as sine wave carriers, symbol rate, and mod-
ulation type. These features are detected by analyzing a
spectral correlation function that discriminates that
noise being wide-sense stationary signal with no correla-
tion against modulated signals being cyclostationary with
spectral correlation due to embedded redundancy of sig-
nal periodicities. A spectral correlation function is a two-
dimensional transform, in contrast with power spectrum
density used by an energy detector which is a one dimen-
sional transform (Figure 13). Furthermore, power spec-
trum density is a special case of spectral correlation for
offset 0. Its main advantage in detection is that noise cor-
relation estimate goes to zero as the observation time
increases, regardless of its power, thus making it robust
to unknown noise and interference variance. However, its
implementation complexity is increased by N 2 complex
multiplications to perform the cross-correlation of the N
point FFT outputs, while the energy detector has com-
plexity of N point FFT.
Frequency Agile Transmission
After identifying and selecting an available spectrum
segment, a Cognitive Radio should use modulation
schemes that provide the best spectrum utilization and
capacity while avoiding interference to any primary
user. The desired transmission scheme should be flexi-
ble enough to allow assignments of any band to any
user, and should be scalable with the number of users
and bands. In the ideal case, this flexible wideband
3
2.5
2
Feature
Detect 1.5
1
0.5
150
0
−300 −150 0 150 Frequency f
Cycle α 300 −150
(b)
SECOND QUARTER 2006
transmission would be realized by digital domain wave-
form synthesis, where a set of parameters specifies
transmission bands and power control. An approach
using multiple frequency band specific filters and syn-
thesizers in analog domain would have large cost and
complexity of implementation, and furthermore it would
have limited flexibility.
The digital modulation scheme based on orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a natural
approach due to inherent frequency sub-banding. OFDM
has become the modulation of choice in many broadband
systems due to its inherent multiple access mechanism,
simplicity in channel equalization, and benefits of frequen-
cy diversity and coding. OFDM spectrum access is scalable
while keeping users orthogonal and non-interfering,
provided the users are synchronized. In order to keep the
cognitive receiver demodulator fairly simple, it is desir-
able to restrict a single user transmission to a single fre-
quency band. This constraint could be further justified by
examining the potential interference caused to an active
primary user in the vicinity from a single user rather than
the aggregate transmission power of many users.
However, the conventional OFDM scheme does not
provide truly band-limited signals due to spectral leak-
age caused by sinc-pulse shaped transmission resulted
from the IFFT operation. This will cause interference to
the adjacent band primary users proportional to the
power allocated to the cognitive user on the corre-
sponding adjacent sub-carrier. Therefore, an OFDM
transmitter must be adapted in the following way. First,
a power measurement obtained from the spectrum
sensing is used to create transmit power mask to pro-
tect the active primary user in the adjacent band.
Primary User f2
LNA
LNA
LNA
Primary User f1
Figure 14. Spatial filtering approach to dynamic range reduction and sensitivity increase.
SECOND QUARTER 2006
Then, the OFDM sub-carrier assignment must be
shaped to fit the spectrum mask through either: a)
introducing guard bands, b) windowing, and c) power
control per sub-carrier.
Wideband Front-Ends for Cognitive Radios
The approach of using the flexibility of digital process-
ing to provide agility and complex processing to exploit
the multiple degrees of freedom that is necessary to
implement a Cognitive Radio places significant con-
straints on the implementation of RF front-end and sam-
pling circuitry. The problem does not arise from the
complex processing but rather from the large in-band
interferers, which must be accommodated. The wide-
band RF signal presented at the antenna of such a front-
end includes signals from close and widely separated
transmitters, and from transmitters operating at widely
different power levels and channel bandwidths. One of
the main limitations in a radio front-end’s ability to
detect small signals is its dynamic range, which also
dictates the requirement for number of bits in analog-
to-digital (A/D) converter. The wideband sensing
requires multi-GHz speed A/D converters together with
high resolution (of 12 or more bits). The scaling of
CMOS technology improves the transistor operating
frequency, which could be used for increased sampling
rate, but adversely affects the design of precision ana-
log circuitry. With the reduction in supply voltage that
scales with the transistor features, the inherent transis-
tor gain decreases, the voltage headroom decreases,
and device noise and leakage increase, making it diffi-
cult to design high-resolution A/D converters. There-
fore, reducing the strong in-band primary user signals,
a1
a2 Digital BB
AGC A/D Adaptive
Algorithm
aN
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 41
 which are not of interest, is necessary to receive and
process weak signals. Commonly, this reduction would
be achieved by filtering a strong signal through a notch
filter. However, in the wideband implementation, strong
primary user signals can be located anywhere in the fre-
quency band requiring tunable filters, which might be
too complex to implement.
An alternative approach for dynamic range reduction
would be to filter signals in the spatial domain by using
multiple antennas. Through beamforming techniques, sig-
nals can be selectively received or suppressed using
antenna arrays. However, multiple antenna processing
must be done in the analog domain before the automatic
gain control circuits which then properly amplify reduced
dynamic range signal for the best utilization of the num-
ber of bits in the A/D converter.
The architecture of a wideband RF front-end
enhanced with an antenna array for spatial filtering is
shown in Figure 14. This architecture could be imple-
mented as a phased antenna array where the antenna
array coefficients are computed in the digital domain
and fed back to analog phase shifters to adjust the gains
and phases of the antenna elements. The use of simple
phase shifters is particularly attractive due to the very
low latency needed for fast convergence of the desired
array response. In addition to dynamic range reduction,
multiple antennas at the receiver could provide an addi-
tional sensitivity gain needed for spectrum sensing of
weak primary user signals.
Testbed for Cognitive Radio Experiments
As presented in the earlier sections, there are a number
of new functionalities involved in Cognitive Radio design
from algorithms and architectures to protocol levels.
One approach for system design exploration is to use a
testbed platform that provides flexibility and rapid
reconfiguration for testing systems under controlled but
realistic environments. Using a testbed experiment has

Primary User
802.11 b/g WLAN Card

Primary User
802.11 b/g WLAN Card Wideband Wideband RF
RF and and
High-Speed High-Speed
D/A and A/D D/A and A/D
Cognitive Radio Emulation Cognitive Radio Emulation

BEE 2
Ethernet Network Interface Platform

Scenario Control:
Primary User Traffic Pattern Generator: On/Off, Channel, Rate
Wideband RF Cognitive Radio: Sensing, Cooperation, and Transmission Cycle
and
High-Speed
D/A and A/D
Primary User
Real-Time Link
Cognitive Radio Emulation User Cooperation 802.11 b/g WLAN Card
Measurements

Sensing Algorithms
Wideband
(Energy and
Transmission
Feature Detection)

Control Channel Emulation

Wideband RF
and
High-Speed Wideband RF
Optical Link (Range < 1/3 mi)
D/A and A/D and
High-Speed
Cognitive Radio Emulation D/A and A/D
Cognitive Radio Emulation

Figure 15. A cognitive radio network emulation in the presence of primary users (802.11b/g wireless cards) in 2.4 GHz band using
BWRC testbed based on BEE2 platform.

42 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE SECOND QUARTER 2006

become a common strategy in research communities BEE2 [19] consists of 5 Vertex-IIPro70 FPGAs. Each
and industry. Testbeds have been predominantly used FPGA embeds a PowerPC 405 core, which minimizes the
to test single point-to-point links and measure estab- latency between the microprocessor and reconfig-
lished metrics such as BER vs. SNR and effective urable logic. In addition, it can run Linux and a full IP
throughput under different wireless channel propaga- protocol stack, which is convenient for connection with
tion environments. However, Cognitive Radio research laptops and other network devices. The 100 Base-T Eth-
requires new testbed capabilities due to interaction ernet interface also allows easy management and con-
between different algorithms and protocols. For exam- trol. The software tool chain is augmented with
ple, two different sensing algorithms, energy or feature BWRC-developed automation tools for mapping high-
detection, can be employed for user sensing coopera- level block diagrams and state machine specifications
tion, with or without sensing interval coordination. Also, to FPGA configurations. As a result, the BEE2 can be
diverse transmission approaches might cause different programmed using Matlab/Simulink from Mathworks
amount of interference to the primary links, and these coupled with the Xilinx system generator. Each BEE2
interference measurements require the testing of two can connect to 18 front-end boards via 10 Gbit/s full
interacting yet independent systems. Furthermore, a duplex Infiniband interfaces. By using optical trans-
control channel design has influence on both the physi- ceivers compatible with Infiniband connectors, optical
cal and link layers, thus requiring real-time experiments. cable can connect front-end boards at distances up to
Therefore there is a new set of requirements that a 1/3 of a mile away from BEE2 in order to perform differ-
Cognitive Radio testbed should satisfy: ent scenario experiments. In addition, the optical link
1) An ability to support multiple radios which can
be emulated as either primary radios or Cogni-
tive radios, which translates into large number of
testbed I/Os.
2) Real-time experiments with a minimum latency in
spectrum measurements is necessary, as the inter-
ference is a real-time measurement and its analysis
requires accurate time stamps to resolve its
sources. A real-time operation requires high pro-
cessing power and support of parallelism.
3) Central processing enables information exchange
between multiple radios for sensing and coopera-
tion and control channel implementation. There-
fore, one platform must connect many radios
rather than collecting data from many independ-
ent radios.
Figure 16. BEE2 processing board.
4) A sufficiently wide band radio front-end with agility
over multiple sub-channels enhanced with vari-
able number of antennas for spatial processing is
needed.
5) An ability to perform various range experiments in
different environments, e.g., shadowing and multi-
path, indoor and outdoor environments are also
required.
6) The testbed should also provide support for
reconfigurability and fast prototyping through a
software design flow that allows algorithms and
protocol description.
The Berkeley Wireless Research Center testbed has
been designed to satisfy these requirements and imple-
ment scenarios as illustrated in Figure 15. It is built
around the Berkeley Emulation Engine 2 (BEE2), a gener-
Figure 17. 2.4 GHz radio front-end with sampling circuits and
ic multi-purpose FPGA based, emulation platform for optical interface to BEE2.
computationally intensive applications (Figure 16). The

SECOND QUARTER 2006 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 43

 provides good analog signal isolation on the front-end
side from the digital noise sources created by BEE2.
The front-end system has been designed in a modu-
lar fashion to operate in 2.4 GHz band over 80 MHz
bandwidth with the possibility to scale up to 16 anten-
nas through parallel operation. The analog/baseband
board (Figure 17) contains a 14-bit 128 MHz D/A con-
verter, 12-bit 64 MHz A/D converters, and 20 MHz wide
baseband filters. In addition, it contains a Xilinx Vertex-
IIPro20 FPGA to support the optical interface to BEE2
and provides additional resources for on-board data
processing and control. A separate RF modem module
connects to the baseband board with the flexibility to
operate in two modes: a) the on-board PLL can be pro-
grammable to cover the entire 80 MHz range; b) the RF
LO is fed externally from the RF distribution board to
provide a common source for multiple antennas. In
addition all front-end boards can be clocked by the
same programmable clock source derived from the
clock distribution board to feed 16 radios.
“What’s Next?”
The underlay and overlay sharing strategies to increasing
spectrum utilization which have been discussed repre-
sent only the first steps towards implementing such sys-
tems. In particular, interference to the secondary users
which must tolerate in-band, allocated users, is a chal-
lenging design task. Ways of coping with an “interference
channel” as opposed to a Gaussian noise channel has lit-
tle theoretical support, other than the information theory
result that a large interfering signal does not significantly
reduce capacity, since it can be detected and subtracted
out. How such subtraction is actually implemented is of
course not indicated by the information theoretic results,
but it is comforting to the implementer that we are not
working against fundamental limits.
In addition to mitigating interference, the new sharing
radios will need to have a more precise estimation of the
channel in not only frequency but time and space as well.
This implies more complicated transmit signal generation
and a more complicated receiver to process the incoming
energy. The design trade-off’s for channel estimation has
not been fully explored yet regarding the amount of time
and computation needed. Another problem that may arise
is that of rapid acquisition. Quick identification and syn-
chronization to an Ultra-Wideband signal in a low SNR
channel with large interferers may require an excessively
large amount of computation if attempted in parallel and a
highly flexible Cognitive Radio needs to have a way to
keep all users in the network synchronized while under-
going rapid changes in the signaling waveform.
As the characteristics of the physical layer of these
sharing radios become better understood, issues at the
44 IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
higher levels of the protocol stack will also appear. For
example, the trade-offs in multiple access are not under-
stood and the issues of setup and maintenance in very
low signal to interference environments are expected to
be particularly challenging. It will require much work in
testbed realizations of complete systems to determine
how these systems can best be designed.
Probably of main interest in these recent develop-
ments to increase spectrum utilization is that the chal-
lenge of developing radio systems that co-exist must only
meet the requirement of not creating “harmful” interfer-
ence as opposed to the need to produce “no” interfer-
ence. This provides an enormous opportunity to find new
ways that wireless systems can co-exist, beyond simple
frequency allocation which has been essentially the only
technique used since interference first became an issue.
This fundamental change will no doubt be far reaching
and will ultimately make the spectrum allocation chart of
Figure 1 appear embarrassingly naïve to the future radio
system designer.
References
[1] NTIA, “U.S. frequency allocations,” [online] http://www.ntia.doc.
gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf
[2] “Spectrum Policy task force report,” Federal Communications Com-
mission, Tech. Rep. TR 02-155, Nov. 2002.
[3] First Report and Order, Federal Communications Commission Std.
FCC 02-48, Feb. 2002.
[4] http://www.ieee802.org/15/pub/TG3a.html
[5] http://www.ieee802.org/15/pub/TG4a.html
[6] I.D. O’Donnell and R.W. Brodersen, “An ultra-wideband transceiver
architecture for low power, low rate, wireless systems,” IEEE Trans. on
Vehicular Technology, submitted for publication Sept./Dec. 2005.
[7] A. Aggarwal et al., “A low power implementation for the transmit
path of a UWB transceiver,” in Proc. CICC’05, pp. 149–152, Sep. 2005.
[8] M.S.W. Chen and R. Brodersen, “A subsampling UWB radio architecture
by analytic signaling,” in Proc. ICASSP’04, vol. 4, pp. 533–536, May 2004.
[9] J. Bergervoet et al., “An interference robust receive chain for UWB
radio in SiGe BiCMOS,” in Proc. ISSCC’05, pp. 200–201, Feb. 2005.
[10] A. Ismail and A. Abidi, “A 3.1 to 8.2 GHz direct conversion receiver for
MB-OFDM UWB communications,” in Proc. ISSCC05’, pp. 208–209, Feb. 2005.
[11] S. Lida et al., “A 3.1 to 5 GHz CMOS DSSS UWB transceiver for
WPANs,” in Proc. ISSCC’05, pp. 214–215, Feb. 2005.
[12] B. Razavi et al., “A 0.13 µm CMOS UWB transceiver,” in Proc.
ISSCC’05, pp. 216–217, Feb. 2005.
[13] J. Mitola III, “Cognitive radio an integrated agent architecture for
software defined radio,” Ph.D. thesis, KTH Royal Institute of Technology,
Stockholm, Sweden, 2000.
[14] FCC. ET docket no. 03-322. Notice of Proposed Rule Making and
Order, Dec. 2003.
[15] D. Cabric, S.M. Mishra, D. Willkomm, R. Brodersen and A. Wolisz, “A
cognitive radio approach for usage of virtual unlicensed spectrum,” 14th
IST Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit, June 2005.
[16] D. Cabric, S.M. Mishra, and R.W. Brodersen, “Implementation issues
in spectrum sensing for cognitive radios,” Asilomar Conference on Sig-
nals, Systems, and Computers, 2004.
[17] A. Sahai, N. Hoven, and R. Tandra, “Some fundamental limits on
cognitive radio,” in Proc. of Allerton Conference, Monticello, Oct. 2004.
[18] W.A. Gardner, “Signal interception: A unifying theoretical framework for
feature detection,” IEEE Trans. on Communications, vol. 36, no. 8, Aug. 1988.
[19] C. Chang, J. Wawrzynek, and R.W. Brodersen, “BEE2: A high-end
reconfigurable computing system,” IEEE Design and Test of Computers,
Configurable Computing: Fabrics and Systems.
SECOND QUARTER 2006
 Danijela Cabric received the Dipl. Ing.
degree from the University of Belgrade,
Yugoslavia, in 1998 and the M.S. degree
in electrical engineering from the Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles in
2001. She is currently working toward
the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineer-
ing at the University of California at
Berkeley, under Prof. Brodersen, where she is a mem-
ber of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. In 2001,
she was with Innovics Wireless, Los Angeles, where
she worked as a senior system design engineer on the
algorithm development for a dual-antenna WCDMA
mobile receiver. In 2004, she held internship position
with Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, where she worked
on the system design of a cognitive radio in the UHF
TV band. Her current research interests include cogni-
tive radio physical layer design and multiple antennas
system implementation.
Ian D. O’Donnell received the B.S. and
M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science from the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley in 1993
and 1996, respectively. His master’s
topic was in the area of digital, low-
power, CMOS circuit design for a wire-
less LAN receiver as part of the
InfoPad project. From 1996 to 1999 he worked at Sili-
con Graphics, Inc. as a digital ASIC designer, and in
1999 he joined NVIDIA, Inc. where he worked on high-
speed serial design. In 1998 he returned to Berkeley at
the Berkeley Wireless Research Center to work in the
area of low-power, integrated, picocellular radios. His
Ph.D. research focus is the design and implementation
of an impulse-based, low-power Ultra-Wideband trans-
ceiver in 0.13 micron CMOS suitable for sensor net-
work applications.
SECOND QUARTER 2006
Mike Shuo-Wei Chen received the B.S.
degree from National Taiwan University,
Taipei, Taiwan, in 1998 and the M.S. degree
from UC Berkeley in 2002, both in Electri-
cal Engineering. He is currently working
toward the Ph.D. degree at UC Berkeley,
where he is a member of the Berkeley
Wireless Research Center.
His current research interests include low-power and
high-speed mixed signal circuits, ultra-wideband sys-
tem design, digital baseband and digital ASIC imple-
mentation. Mr. Chen achieved an honorable mention in
Asian Pacific Mathematics Olympiad, 1994. He was the
recipient of UC Regents’ Fellowship at Berkeley in 2000.
Robert W. Brodersen received the B.S.
degrees in Electrical Engineering and
Mathematics from the California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA in
1966, the Engineering and Master’s of Sci-
ence degrees from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) Cambridge
in 1968 and the Ph.D. degree in Engineer-
ing from MIT in 1972. He received the award Honor Doctor
of Technology (Technologie Doctor Honoris Causa) from
the University of Lund, Sweden, 1999.
From 1972–1976, he was a member of the Technical
Staff, Central Research Laboratory, Texas Instruments,
Dallas. He joined the faculty at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley in 1976 where he is currently the John R.
Whinnery Distinguished Professor in the Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also
the co-scientific director of the Berkeley Wireless
Research Center (BWRC) where his research focus is
new applications of integrated circuits as applied to per-
sonal communications systems with emphasis on wire-
less communications, low power design and the CAD
tools necessary to support these activities.
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 45