Concurrent Communication and Sensing in Cognitive Radio Devices: Challenges and an Enabling Solution

Cognitive radios (CRs) need to continuously monitor the availability of unoccupied spectrum. Prior work on spectrum sensing mainly focused on time-slotted schemes where sensing and communication take place on different time periods in the same frequency. This however leads to a) limited CR throughput as data transmissions need to be interrupted for the sensing task, and b) unreliable detection performance since sensing happens in specific confined time durations. The paper describes the basic design challenges and hardware requirements that restrain CRs from simultaneously and continuously sensing the spectrum while transmitting in the same frequency band. The paper then describes a novel approach based on spatial filtering that promises to empower CRs with concurrent transmission and sensing capabilities. The idea is to equip the CR with redundant transmit antennas for forming an adaptive spatial filter that selectively nulls the transmit signal in the sensing direction. By doing so, a wideband isolation level of ~ 60 dB is obtained by the antenna system. Finally, by following the spatial filtering stage with active power cancellation in the radio-frequency stage and in the baseband stage, a total isolation in excess of a 100 dB required for enabling concurrent communication and sensing can be obtained.