Implementation Aspects of Flexible Frequency Spectrum Usage Algorithm for Cognitive OFDM Systems

The next generation (4G) communication technologies are explicitly designed to cope with the issues related to the deployment of broadband connections in more dynamic environments compared to the past. The desired flexibility of networks, where many operators are expected to operate at the same time on a shared spectrum chunk, emphasizes the role of resource allocation as a critical system design issue. This work is aimed at analyzing the practical issues related to the Software Defined Radio (SDR)-based implementation of a dynamic spectrum allocation algorithm, designed for OFDM(A) frameworks, and its hardware feasibility on FPGA. The complexity analysis of the implementation is per formed in terms of area and execution time on a Virtex 5 FPGA. Experimental results illustrate that the selected core functionalities are effectively implementable with around 3% or less of the total FPGA computing resources.