What About Spectrum Opportunities in 'Angle' Dimension for Dynamic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio Network context? A new Paradigm in Spectrum Sensing

The cognitive radio technology is the new paradigm to fulfill ever increasing need of bandwidth ultimately the radio spectrum by accommodating the radio spectrum dynamically to secondary users/unlicensed users without causing the interference. In cognitive radio, the spectrum opportunities have been checked for Space, Time and frequency dimensions but 'Angle' dimension has not been explored till now. In this paper we have investigated accuracy of various 'Angle-of-Arrival (AoA)' estimation algorithms: ESPRIT, MUSIC, Bartlett, and Capon for opportunistic secondary users' network under AWGN and time varying fading channels. The improvement in performance of these algorithms has been observed as array elements, signal-to-noise ratio and samples increases. An 'adaptive thresholding' technique has been proposed to improve the performance of AoA algorithms. Thus by estimating an 'Angle-of- Arrival' of licensed users, the unlicensed users can be accommodated in the same geographical area into the same channel in the same frequency band at the same time by directing unlicensed users' beam in different direction than the direction of licensed users. Thereby improving spectrum utilization. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.