ST-DSA via Underlay Sensing & Signaling

Over the past decade the research community has generated thousands of papers dealing with many different aspects of dynamic spectrum access, cognitive radios and opportunistic networking. Surprisingly, however, only a handful have addressed an end to end DSA communication system, and to the best of our knowledge none have looked at how DSA can be enabled in a single transceiver legacy radio. This is per-haps not surprising since the research community is seldom concerned about the transitionability of their results. By striving for optimality we often require new approaches that require new waveforms or hard-ware architectures and as such ignore the vast investment already made in legacy equipment and the dec-ade long pipeline of program of record (PoR) approved equipment that is yet to be fielded. In our proposed approach we look to strike a balance between maximizing throughput gain via DSA and maximizing the probability for a timely and successful transition. Our approach is based on a novel mechanism for sensing of the spectrum and exchange of the sensing data within the network without any interruption of the data traffic and without any hardware blocks external to the legacy radio.