Cognitive Radio: UWB Integration and Related Antenna Design

The emerging feature-rich and high-data-rate wireless applications have put increasing demand on radio spectrum. The scarcity of spectrum and the inefficiency in its usage, as caused by the current radio spectrum regulations, necessitate the development of new dynamic spectrum allocation policies to better exploit the existing spectrum. The current spectrum allocation regulations assign specific bands to particular services, and grant licensed band access to licensed users only. Cognitive Radio (CR) will revolutionize the way spectrum is allocated. In a CR network, the intelligent radio part allows unlicensed users (secondary users) to access spectrum bands licensed to primary users, while avoiding interference with them. In this scheme, a secondary user can use spectrum sensing hardware/software to locate spectrum portions with reduced primary user activity or idle spectrum slots, select the best available channel, coordinate access to this channel with other secondary users, and vacate the channel when a primary user needs it. To achieve this, the transceiver in a CR system should have awareness of the radio environment in terms of spectrum usage, power spectral density of transmitted/received signals, and wireless protocol signaling, should be able to adaptively tune system parameters such as transmit power, carrier frequency, and modulation strategy. The transceiver should also be ended with an antenna system that can simultaneously operate over a wide frequency band (sensing) and a chosen narrow band (communication), or operate over an ultra-wide frequency band while possibly blocking signals in a narrow frequency range. Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a transmission technique that uses pulses with a very short time duration across a very large frequency portion of the spectrum. UWB is different from other radio frequency communication techniques in that it does not use RF carriers, but instead employs modulated high frequency pulses of low power with a duration of less than 1 nanosecond. From the perspective of other communication systems, the UWB transmissions are part of the low power background noise. Therefore UWB promises to enable the usage of licensed spectrum without harmful interference to primary communication systems, and can be used as an enabling technology for implementing CR. In this chapter, we offer a general overview of Cognitive Radio and dynamic spectrum access, discuss the advantages of using UWB as an enabling technology for CR, and give