Mid Sweden University

Spectrum sensing plays a key role for radio resource awareness in cognitive radio. To enhance the capabilities of cognitive radio nodes, exploiting the spatial resource in addition to frequency and time re-sources seems reasonable. This thesis investigates the possibility of exploiting the spatial resources during sensing and transmission using sector antennas which is also termed as directional spectrum sensing and transmission. The measured radiation patterns from fabricated antenna and radiation patterns obtained from analytical expressions representing circular array of dipole are used for performance analysis. A ray tracer tool is used for modelling the urban environment as well as for wave propagation simulation. The power angular profiles obtained at different locations are further processed in MATLAB using measured and analytical radiation patterns to evaluate the performance in terms of spatial opportunity and detection of weak primary signals. The results show that exploiting the spatial dimension in spectrum sensing using sector antennas increase the opportunities for secondary communication and also improves the detection of primary signals as compared with an omni-directional antenna. Additionally, directional sensing and trans-mission are studied together using analytical radiation patterns. The results show that the service probability as well as range of communica-tion increases with an increase in number of sectors but saturation is achieved when nine sectors are used, indicating that six sectors antenna is the optimum choice for exploring the spatial resource in cognitive radio in a typical multipath urban environment.