Spectral agility of NC-OFDM transmission for Dynamic Spectrum Access

To meet the growing demand and scarcity of wireless spectrum, Dynamic Spectrum Access is being looked at as the technology of the future. One of the challenges of this approach is that the unoccupied bandwidth is fragmented and non-contiguous. As a result the secondary transceivers need a degree of spectral agility to operate in such conditions. In this work, we review spectral agility and feasibility of Non-Contiguous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in terms of interference mitigation. The paper begins with brief background in cognitive radio concepts and spectrum sensing followed by viability of NC-OFDM as modulation scheme for DSA systems. Finally, NC-OFDM is compared with its filter-bank approach counterpart Non-Contiguous Non-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (NC-NOFDM) in terms of implementation complexity.