Intelligent Reconfigurable Wideband Spectrum Characterization for 5G Applications

3GPP 5G New Radios are expected to operate not only on the licensed bands but also on the unlicensed and shared bands. To process such a wideband spectrum, the base stations (BS) should be capable of characterizing the wideband spectrum. Moreover, since multi-antenna and beamforming are de-facto approaches in 5G, characterization of spectrum is desired over both time as well as spatial domains. In this research work, we develop an intelligent and reconfigurable architecture for non-contiguous wideband spectrum characterization (WSC) which involves the recovery of wideband band spectrum and the determination of occupancy status, carrier frequencies and direction of arrivals of the detected busy bands. Here, reconfigurability allows the BS to digitize selected non-contiguous frequency bands by performing sub-Nyquist sampling. Whereas intelligence allows the selection of desired frequency bands such that characterization failure does not occur. To check the applicability of the proposed WSC in the real radio environment, we also developed its NI-USRP based hardware prototype. This research work has found significant traction both with academia as well as industry given the multitude of use cases in 5G requiring efficient sensing and spectrum characterization for enhanced system operation.