Abstract
In wireless communication, efficient spectrum usage is an issue that has been an attractive research area for many technologies. Recently new technologies innovations allow compact radios to transmit with power efficient communication over very long distances. For example, Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are an attractive emerging platform to connect the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Especially, LoRa is one of LPWAN technologies and considered as an infrastructure solution for IoT. End-devices use LoRa protocol across a single wireless hop to communicate to gateway(s) connected to the internet which acts as a bridge and relays message between these LoRa end-devices to a central network server. The use of the (ISM) spectrum sharing for such long-range networking motivates us to implement spectrum sensing testbed for cognitive radio network based on LoRa and GNU radio. In cognitive radio (CR), secondary users (SUs) are able to sense and use this information to opportunistically access the licensed spectrum band in absence of the primary users (PUs). In general, PUs have not been very receptive of the idea of opportunistic spectrum sharing. That is, CR will harmfully interfere with operations of PUs. Subsequently, there is a need for experimenting with different techniques in a real system. In this paper, we implemented spectrum sensing for cognitive radio networks based on LoRa and GNU Radio, and further analyzed corresponding performances of the implemented systems. The implementation is done using Microchip LoRa evolution kits, USRPs, and GNU radio.
