Experimental Assessment of Harmful Interference Between Broadcasting and Distributed Cognitive Radio Networks in Real Scenarios
Rodney Martínez Alonso, David Plets, Arley Coto Guerra, Yosvany Hervis Santana, Ernesto Fontes Pupo, Alejandro González García, Rufino Cabrera, Glauco Antonio Guillén Nieto, Luc Martens, Wout Joseph · 2020
Spectrum scarcity has become a challenge for the growing demand of wireless services. Paradoxically, although most of the sub-1-GHz spectrum is assigned it is underutilized in the space and time domain. Several surveys demonstrate a spectrum usage efficiency lower than 20%. Cognitive Radio technologies has been proposed as a long-term solution for tackling spectrum scarcity and inefficiency. However, a major concern has been the interference to and from the primary licensed service. In this paper we investigate the coexistence between broadcasting digital television and LTE-A distributed cognitive radio in real scenarios. Our research revealed that, for the worst case the LTE-A distributed cognitive radio causes a degradation of the broadcasting service QoE higher than 60%. For the LTE-A network there is up to 5 dB C/I margin that does not worsen its QoS, being a potential resource for networking optimization and interference mitigation.