Spectrum awareness scheme of the rapidly deployable eNodeB for unexpected and temporary events

In the EU FP7 ICT project ABSOLUTE, a novel network architecture based on the LTE-A aerial and terrestrial rapidly deployable eNodeB (RD-eNodeB) systems has been proposed for emergency communications in unexpected and temporary events. These systems would experience complex spectrum environment with multiple unknown coexisting cellular networks, which needs to be quickly adapted with cognitive radio techniques for rapid deployment. To this end, this paper proposes a spectrum awareness scheme considering initial spectrum sensing on RD-eNodeB, sensing using UE's measurement capability and the radio environment map (REM) during the roll-out and in-service phases of the system's operation. For the initial spectrum sensing, a novel scheme for detecting, classifying and measuring downlink signals from coexisting base stations with different radio access technologies (RATs) is presented, which is invulnerable to the noise uncertainty problem. Encouraging numerical results of effectively detecting and classifying coexisting UMTS signal and LTE signals with different physical layer identities have been obtained via simulation.