Energy Detection Based Estimation of Channel Occupancy Rate with Adaptive Noise Estimation

Recently, there has been growing interest in opportunistically utilizing the 2.4 GHz ISM-band. Numerous spectrum occupancy measurements covering the ISM-band have been performed to analyze the spectrum usage. However, in these campaigns the verification of the correctness of the obtained occupancy values for the highly dynamic ISMband has not been presented. In this paper, we propose and verify channel occupancy rate (COR) estimation utilizing energy detection mechanism with a novel adaptive energy detection threshold setting method. The results are compared with the true reference COR values. Several different types of verification measurements showed that our setup can estimate the COR values of 802.11 traffic well, with negligible overestimation. The results from real-time real-life measurements also confirm that the proposed adaptive threshold setting method enables accurate thresholds even in the situations where multiple interferers are present in the received signal. key words: occupancy measurements, cognitive radio, wireless LAN