Cyclostationarity-based methods for the extraction of the channel allocation information in a spectrum pooling system

Spectrum pooling can be considered as a first step towards a fully dynamic spectrum allocation strategy. It allows a license owner to share a sporadically used part of his licensed spectrum with a renter system, until he needs it himself. For the smooth operation of a spectrum pooling scheme, the renter system has to monitor the channel and extract the channel allocation information (CAI), i.e. it has to detect which parts of the shared spectrum the owner system accesses, in order to immediately vacate the frequency bands being required by the license owner and to gain access to the frequency bands which the license owner has stopped using. This work presents and compares two methods based on exploiting the cyclostationary properties of the spectrum owner signal for the extraction of the CAI in a specific spectrum pooling scenario, where the license owner is a GSM network and the spectrum renter is an OFDM based WLAN system.