Designing a Real-time Swept Spectrum Analyser with USRP B210
Cognitive radio has received considerable amount of attention as a promising technique to provide dynamic spectrum allocation. Spectrum sensing is one of the basic functions in the cognitive radio and is crucial to all other functions. Software- defined radios (SDRs) are considered due to its very high flexibility and have become a common platform for CR implementation replacing expensive spectrum analysers. The most popular among various SDR platforms is the universal software-defined radio peripheral (USRP). This paper presents a real-time swept spectrum sensing solution based on USRP B210. It also presents a detailed explanation of the concept of energy detection and the methodology for wide-band sensing. Finally, the performance of the proposed sensing solution is analysed through FFT graphs and spectrogram plot taken for 8 hours. The results showed that the proposed sensing solution was capable of achieving high resolution in the frequency domain of the wide band measured which implies that wide bands with heterogenous signals like the ISM band can be accurately resolved and analysed.