SPECTRUM SENSING ON LTE FEMTOCELLS FOR GSM SPECTRUM RE-FARMING USING XILINX FPGAs

Femtocells are a promising solution to provide high coverage and high data rates inside consumer’s homes while cutting operator costs significantly. Next generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) femtocells are likely to be deployed in GSM spectrum, increasing frequency utilisation and allowing a smooth transition to LTE. This paper proposes to use a spectrum sensing technique specialised for LTE signals to avoid interference between neighbour femtocells without operator intervention. Simulation results of the detection characteristics are given. A demonstrator has been implemented on a Xilinx ML507 Virtex 5 prototyping board, using our flexible FPGAbased cognitive radio framework, which allows to use runtime reconfiguration of the FPGA to switch between sensing and normal operation. It demonstrates the sensing algorithm on a real platform.