Spectrum Sensing Based on Time Covariance Matrix
Using GNU Radio and USRP for Cognitive Radio
Abhijeet Mate, Kuo-Hao Lee, and I-Tai Lu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Brooklyn, New York, USA
amate01@students.poly.edu, klee03@students.poly.edu, itailu@poly.edu
Abstract— Cognitive radio (CR) is a critical issue to solve the
spectrum scarcity and to improve frequency spectrum utilization
in wireless communication. Spectrum sensing is the first step for
cognitive radio and it needs to detect signals presence under strict
requirement such that secondary users (unlicensed users) can use
the licensed spectral band without interfering primary users
(licensed users). In this paper, we implement spectrum sensing in
real environment and verify two present algorithms based on the
time-covariance matrix. For the capability of sensing the
spectrum, we make use of Software Defined Radio (SDR), which
provides the ability to modify the hardware characteristics of the
system and the flexibility for programming. Moreover, GNU
Radio is an open source software toolkit which provides different
functions that supports SDR. The need for low cost hardware
platform for an SDR necessitated development of Universal
Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). Combining GNU Radio and
USRP, can be a very powerful tool to develop SDR based wireless
communication systems and to carry out various experiments
and testing. With the premise of high correlations of primary
users and low correlations of additive white Gaussian noise
(AWGN) between two different samples, we evaluated two kinds
of present methods based on time-covariance matrix called
Covariance (COV) method and Maximum-to-Minimum
Eigenvalue (MME) method. To combat the noise uncertainty,
COV uses the ratio between the time correlation and the signal
energy as the signal detection indicator; and MME uses the ratio
of maximum to minimum eigenvalues of the covariance matrix to
detect the signal presence. We analyze the performance of these
methods on GNU radio with USRP. Unlike energy detection
(ED), COV and MME can do spectrum sensing without any prior
knowledge of primary signal and noise power. Furthermore, it
can combat noise uncertainty, of which ED is devoid. We present
the performance of these two methods compared with ED for
BPSK modulation as a primary signal to check the feasibility of
these two algorithms.
Keywords: Cognitive Radio, Energy Detection, Covariance
Method, Eigenvalue Based Method, GNU Radio, Software Defined
Radio, Spectrum Sensing, USRP.
I. INTRODUCTION
The demand for wireless communication capacities is
continuously growing and there is a limitation on the spectrum
availability. So it is important to make use of the available
spectrum efficiently by making use of underutilized frequency
bands. Technology that holds the key to solve this spectrum
scarcity problem is called as Cognitive Radio (CR) [1]. It is a
technology that is capable of dynamically sensing and locating
unused spectrum segments in a target frequency band. These
978-1-4244-9877-2/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
unused segments then can be used by secondary user without
interfering the primary user. Therefore, CR needs precise
algorithms to find the presence of primary signal in a given
frequency band to avoid the collision.
Detecting the presence of primary signal, i.e., Spectrum
Sensing is practically a challenging task in CR. There are
different methods proposed for spectrum sensing [2] but they
have limitations and requirements in real environment. Fading
or increased distance between transmitter and receiver makes
the primary signal power near to the ground. Very low Signal
to Noise Ratio (SNR) e.g. -20dB makes detection harder. Also
detection of signal in short duration is another task.
Importantly, there is no prior information for the noise power
and that makes all above situations more difficult in real
environment [3].
There are various spectrum sensing methods available [2]
such as Energy Detection, Matched Filtering, Cyclostationary
Detection etc. Energy Detection (ED) is a widely used method
because of its low complexity and it does not need information
of the primary signal. But ED is vulnerable to noise
uncertainty and performs poor as compared to other methods
at low SNR [4] [5]. Maximum to Minimum Eigenvalue
method (MME) [6] and Covariance method (COV) [7] are the
methods which overcomes the difficulty with ED. MME
method uses the covariance matrix of the received samples to
find the eigenvalues and then the ratio between maximum and
minimum eigenvalue is compared with the threshold to make
the decision. COV also uses statistical covariance of the
received samples and makes the decision. Both these methods
overcome the noise uncertainty problem and do not require
knowledge of primary signal, channel and noise power.
Performance of both COV and MME methods has been
checked through simulation but it is important to check their
feasibility in real environment. In this paper, we implement
spectrum sensing in real environment and verify both COV
and MME methods. The performance of COV and MME
method is compared with the ED method. For the capability of
sensing the spectrum, we make use of Software Defined Radio
(SDR), which is getting popular in wireless technologies. SDR
provides the ability to modify the hardware characteristics of
the system and the flexibility for programming. Moreover,
GNU Radio [8] is an open source software toolkit which
provides different functions that supports SDR. The need for
low cost hardware platform for an SDR necessitated
development of Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP)
[9]. Combining GNU Radio and USRP, can be a very
powerful tool to develop SDR based wireless communication
The rest of the paper is organized as following:
Fundamental background information about Software Defined
Radio, GNU Radio and USRP is provided in Section II.
Spectrum sensing algorithms are presented in Section III.
Section IV explains the experimental setup and detail
implementation of the experiment. Experiment results and
performance comparison of all three methods are presented in
Section V. Conclusions are drawn in Section VI.
II. SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO (SDR)
SDR is a radio communication system where different
components (e.g. amplifiers, mixers, filters, modulator,
demodulator etc.) are implemented in software instead of
hardware (see Figures 1-3). In SDR, the operating parameters
of frequency range, modulation type, or maximum output
power (either radiated or conducted), or the circumstances
under which the transmitter operates in accordance with
Commission rules, can be altered by making a change in
software without making any changes to hardware
components that affect the radio frequency emissions [10, 11].
In this paper, SDR is implemented using GNU radio and
USRP.
RF Front-end IF Section Baseband
Section
DUC DAC
DSP
DDC ADC
Figure 1. Software Defined Radio
C ++ C ++ C ++
G
Python Glue N signals existence with absence. However, the approaches can
U be divided into two categories: blind test or non-blind test. The
SWIG
R
a contained useful information for non-blind approaches.
C ++ C ++ Signal Processing
d However, the channel state information is not always
i
Blocks o available; this paper considers the blind approaches. We first
C ++
Figure 2. GNU Radio Components
GNU Radio (see Figure 2) is an open source software
toolkit which is a collection of signal processing blocks that
can be used for building SDR with low cost external RF
hardware. It is widely used in the wireless communication
978-1-4244-9877-2/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
systems and to carry out various experiments and testing.
research and real time implementation of software radio
systems [12]. Signal processing blocks are written in C++
programming language. Python is used to connect these signal
processing elements together to form a flow graph. Python
uses simplified wrapper and interface grabber (SWIG) for the
purpose of interfacing C++ routines with python front end
applications.
Connected through USB interface to GNU Radio, USRP
consists of a motherboard and up to four daughterboards. It is
developed by Matt Ettus [9] as a flexible low-cost platform for
SDR. It can function as both transmitter and receiver for
different frequencies depending on the daughterboards.
Motherboard has four 12-bit Analog to Digital Converters
(ADCs) with sampling rate 64 MS/s, four 14-bit Digital to
Analog Converters (DACs) with speed up to 128 MS/s, two
Digital Up Converters (DUCs) to up convert the baseband
signal before transmitting it to the selected output frequency
and four Digital Down Converters (DDCs) to decimate IF
before sending it to ADC. ADC and DAC are connected to an
Altera Cyclone EP1C12 FPGA. FPGA is connected to a USB2
interface chip and to GNU Radio [13]. High speed digital
signal processing (DSP) is performed in the FPGA [13]. USRP
is capable to operate in full duplex mode in real time.
Daughterboards are mounted on motherboard providing a fully
flexible integrated front-end. Wide varieties are available to
use different frequencies for a broad range of applications.
Figure 3. Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP)
III. SPECTRUM SENSING ALGORITHMS
Spectrum sensing can be described as how to distinguish
prior knowledge sometimes will be sent by transmitter which
define two hypothesis of a received signal in the Additive
White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel:
H 0 : R ( n) = W ( n) n = 1,..., N (1)
H1 : R(n) = S (n) + W (n) n = 1,..., N (2)
where N is the number of samples, S(n) is the transmitted
signal, W(n) is the AWGN and R(n) is the received signal. H0
denotes that the signal is absent and H1 does that signal is −1
⎛ 2 ⎞⎛ 2 ⎞
transmitted. Furthermore, we assumed W(n) is zero mean with K COV = ⎜ 1 + ( L − 1) −1
⎟⎟ ⎜⎜ 1 − Q ( Pfa ) ⎟ . (11)
the variance σw2. ⎜ NSπ N S ⎟⎠
⎝ ⎠⎝
Energy Detection [4] [5]: If TCOV ≥ KCOV, we claim that the primary user is present; and if
For ED, by using hypothesis in (1) and (2) the received TCOV < KCOV the primary signal is absent.
power is estimated by ,
N
[ R(n)]2 Eigenvalue based Detection [6]:
TE = ∑
n =1
N
. (3) MME method is based on the ratio of maximum and
minimum eigenvalue. Assuming the hypothesis (1), (2) and by
using the covariance matrix provided in (9). The estimator of
The threshold can be chosen by theoretical computation [11].
MME is given by [6]
ED involves the least computation but it requires high SNR α = λ Max / λ Min . (12)
environment. For when it comes to low signal power, the noise Here, we call α as the radio of maximum to minimum
uncertainty would affect the accuracy of detection. eigenvalue; the theoretical threshold γ can be derived from [6]
Covariance Based Detection [7]:
( ) ⎛
( ) ⎞
2 −2/ 3
N s + ML N s + ML
Unlike the ED, COV and MME utilize the time correlation γ= × ⎜⎜ 1 + F −1 (1 − Pfa ) ⎟⎟ (13)
( − ML ) ( N s ML )
2 1/ 6
of received signal. In ideal situation, the correlation of noise Ns ⎜ ⎟
⎝ ⎠
samples should be zero due to AWGN channel, whereas the
Where, M=1 is applied here. The probability of false alarm can
correlation would not be equal to zero if the time separation
be written by [6]
within different samples are smaller than data symbol duration.
Threshold of both COV and MME method have no relation
with SNR. Pfa = 1 − F1 ⎜
s (
⎛γ ⋅ N − L 2 −μ ⎞
⎜ ⎟
(14)
)
ν ⎟
Considering the consecutive samples we received and ⎜ ⎟
hypothesis (1) and (2), the covariance matrices of received ⎝ ⎠
Where, μ = ( N s − 1 + L ) , ν = ( N s − 1 + L )(1 N s + 1 L )
2 13
samples could be written as: and
rR = E[ R(n) R H (n)] (4) F1 is the Tracy-Widom distribution for the order 1 (Eq. (24),
[6]). If α > γ then channel is occupied with a primary signal
rS = E[ S (n) S H (n)] (5) else channel is free for secondary user.
and
IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
H1 : rR = rS + σ w2 I(6)
For the spectrum sensing algorithms previously mentioned
H0 : rR = σ w I
2
(7)
in section III, Figure 4 shows the experimental setup. GNU
Where, rR can be estimated by (4) and rS by (5). The Radio and USRP were used for the experiment to find out the
autocorrelation can be estimated as following [7]: performance of ED, COV and MME method in real
N s −1 environment. A desktop and a laptop installed with GNU
1
χ (l ) =
Ns ∑ r ( n) r (n − l )
n =0
R R l = 0,1,..., L − 1, (8) Radio and two USRP are used to run these experiments.
Laptop connected with one USRP acted as the transmitter
while computer and another USRP used as the receiver.
Where, NS is the number of samples and L is smooth factor [7]. Daughter board mounted on both USRP is RFX900 which is
rR would become a toeplitz and symmetric matrix, i.e.
tunable from 800 MHz to 1000 MHz. All the experiments are
⎛ χ (0) … χ ( L − 1) ⎞ performed indoor and the distance between two USRP is
⎜ ⎟ 70cm.
rR = ⎜ ⎟. (9)
At the transmitter, GNU Radio Companion is used to build
⎜ χ ( L − 1) χ (0) ⎟
⎝ ⎠ the transmitter block. BPSK modulation scheme is used with 8
samples/symbol and the amplitude of the carrier is varied to
The correlated estimator can be written by (see [7])
find the efficiency of different methods at different SNRs. The
−1 modulated signal is then passed to USRP via USB2.0
⎛ L L ⎞⎛ L ⎞
TCOV =⎜ ∑∑
⎜ i =1,i ≠ j
(rˆR )ij ⎟ ⎜∑
⎟ ⎜⎝ i =1
(rˆR )ii ⎟
⎟
⎠
. (10)
communication and the digital up conversion and digital to
analog conversion is done inside USRP to send the signal at
⎝ j =1 ⎠ 904MHz frequency. The transmitter for all three spectrum
Theoretically, with the presence of signal, TCOV is larger than 1, sensing method remains the same.
whereas TCOV=1. However, in real work, TCOV won’t be equal to At the receiver, signal is received through the (RFX900
1 as the signal is absent. Thus, we still need to resort to the board) USRP and is converted to Intermediate Frequency (IF).
theoretical threshold [7] This IF is then passed to DDC for decimation and to ADC.
Finally this digital data is passed to GNU Radio through
USB2.0 communication for further detection. The data
received through USRP is in complex form and we converted
it into float before sending it to detector block. The structure
of the receiver is the same for all the three methods and three
different detector blocks are built each implemented with
respected algorithm. In ED method, we have calculated the
strength of received samples using (3) and then the output is
compared with the threshold to make the decision. In MME
method, the received data samples are passed to the MME
detector block. The sample covariance matrix is drawn from
the received samples and eigenvalues are calculated from
covariance matrix. The ratio of maximum and minimum
eigenvalue (12) is compared with the threshold (13) to detect
the presence of primary signal. For COV method the sample
covariance matrix is used to calculate the ratio of sum of
diagonal elements and sum of non-diagonal elements (10).
Threshold (11) is compared with the ratio (10) to make the
decision.
receiver only to collect noise samples and pass it through
detector block to apply algorithm and calculate the ratios in
(10) and (12). For COV or MME, from the collected number
of ratios using (10) or (12), respectively, we decide one value
which is greater than 90% of the other collected ratios. This
value is used as new threshold. Same procedure is followed in
both the methods. After setting the new threshold we collect
signal samples and compare its ratio with new threshold to
check how COV and MME method works.
Figure 5 shows the probability of detection Pd as function
of SNR where the smoothing factor L=8, the number of
samples NS =1000 or 3000, and the number of receive antennas
M= 1. For a given approach, the result with NS = 3000 is better
than the result with NS =1000. This is due to the fact that
statistics such as correlations can be derived more accurately
as the number of samples increases. Comparing different
approaches, we observe that MME slightly outperforms COV
and both MME and COV outperform ED with large margins.
Note that the ED results with NS =1000 is very poor and is not
shown here. It is possibly due to noise uncertainty.

Figure 4. Experiment Setup

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The experiments are designed to sense the spectrum at a
mentioned frequency and find the performance of the COV
and MME methods at low SNRs. ED method is also
implemented as a benchmark. The false alarm rate Pfa is set as
0.1. Initially COV and MME method blocks are designed Figure 5. SNR vs. Pd plot for practical implementation
according to the algorithms and the ratios (10) and (12) are Figure 6 shows comparison of the implementations of both
compared with the thresholds (11) and (13), respectively, for MME and COV method on WARP [14] and GNU
the decision. While collecting results, both these methods were Radio/USRP. With NS = 3000 and L=8, it shows that the
showing implausible performance at lower SNR. We performance of both the methods is similar even if the
attempted to discover the reason and we came to the implementation platforms are different.
conclusion that it is due to high correlation between noise
samples. These spectrum sensing algorithms presumes the
channel as AWGN and noise samples are statistically
uncorrelated. Nevertheless, both the methods can be still used
as spectrum sensing algorithm as average correlation values of
signal and noise have difference. But this problem forced us
not to use the theoretical thresholds in (11) and (13) as it
would be inappropriate.
Incorrect threshold problem can be solved by finding new
threshold experimentally. In all experiments we have
considered Pfa equal to 0.1, which means we can have one
wrong decision out of 10 decisions. After setting Pfa we use
 Figure 6. SNR Vs Pd plot for practical implementation with WARP
Figure 7 shows all three methods implemented
theoretically and experimentally with NS =3000. Here,
“theory” denotes numerical results with uncorrelated noises
where the thresholds are estimated using theoretical formulas
such as (11) and (13); “simulation” also denotes the numerical
results with uncorrelated noises but the thresholds are derived
using numerical simulations; and “experiment” denotes the
experimental results where noises are correlated and
thresholds are derived experimentally. (Note that the received
signals used to obtain results denoted by either “theory” or
“simulation” are generated numerically.)
Comparing the theoretical results of the three methods, it is
surprising that COV theory is the best and MME theory is the
worst at low SNR. This is partly due to the facts that the
threshold for COV derived using (11) is underestimated and
the threshold for MME derived using (13) is overestimated at
low SNR. This misrepresentation of theoretical results can be
corrected if the thresholds are derived numerically. As shown
in Fig. 7, COV simulation is similar to MME simulation; and
both COV and MME simulation are 2dB better than ED
simulation when Pd=0.9.
Comparing the experiment results of the three methods, as
shown in Fig. 5, MME experiment is around 2dB better than
COV experiment and COV experiment is around 9dB better
than ED experiment when Pd=0.9.
Figure 7. SNR Vs Pd Plot for theoretical and experimental simulations
Comparing experiment with simulation results, MME
simulation is 2dB better than MME experiment, COV
simulation is around 4 dB better than COV experiment, and
ED simulation is around 11dB better than ED experiment.
Note that only slight degradation occurs at MME experiment
comparing to the MME simulation. Since most spectrum
sensing methods including COV and MME assume an AWGN
channel where noise samples at different times are statistically
independent and uncorrelated, it is remarkable that COV and
MME work with correlated noises. It seems that, if the average
correlation values of noise and signal are significantly
different, both MME and COV should be still functional. It is
also remarkable that there is a large discrepancy between ED
simulation and experiment results since the ED approach is
not sensitive to the noise correlation. The bad performance of
ED experiment may be due to noise uncertainty.
VI. CONCLUSION
Two methods based on time covariance matrix are
proposed and implemented using GNU Radio and USRP to
check their performance in real environment as well as to
solve spectrum sensing problem at low SNRs. Since the key
assumption of these two methods is low correlation of the
received noises, it is remarkable that the two methods still
works with practical experiments using GNU/USRP where
noises are not uncorrelated. The important contribution of this
paper is that we have demonstrated experimentally that both
MME and COV methods outperform the conventional ED
method in practical implementations.
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