Beacon design and detection windows

In this paper, a beacon structure is proposed for the protection of incumbent wireless microphones in a cognitive radio system. The proposed beacon structure consists of two consecutive parts: synchronization bursts followed by payload bursts. Each part is transmitted on two orthogonal channels in parallel to shorten the required sensing windows for fast detection of the beacon. Compared to the current beacon design, the required two (long and short) sensing windows can be shortened significantly and it brings in substantial overhead reduction for the cognitive radio system. A flexible window scheduling method is proposed as well to guarantee the capture of the synchronization bursts.