Reconfigurable and Intelligent Ultra-Wideband Angular Sensing: Prototype Design and Validation

The emergence of beyond-licensed spectrum sharing in FR1 (0.45-6 GHz) and FR2 (24 - 52 GHz) along with the multi-antenna narrow-beam based directional transmissions demand a wideband spectrum sensing in temporal as well as spatial domains. We referred to it as ultra-wideband angular spectrum sensing (UWAS), and it consists of digitization followed by characterization of the wideband spectrum. In this paper, we design and develop state-of-the-art UWAS prototype using USRPs and LabVIEW NXG for the validation in the real-radio environment. Since 5G is expected to co-exist with LTE, the transmitter generates the multi-directional multi-user wideband traffic via LTE specific single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) approach. At the receiver, the first step of wideband spectrum digitization is accomplished using a novel approach of integrating sparse antenna-array with reconfigurable sub-Nyquist sampling (SNS). The reconfigurable SNS allows the digitization of non-contiguous spectrum via low-rate analog-to-digital converters, but it needs intelligence to choose the frequency bands for digitization. We explore the multi-play multi-armed bandit based learning algorithm to embed intelligence. Compared to previous works, the proposed characterization (frequency band status and direction-of-arrival estimation) approach does not need prior knowledge of received signal distribution. The detailed experimental results for various spectrum statistics, power gains and antenna array arrangements along with lower complexity validate the functional correctness, superiority and feasibility of the proposed UWAS over state-of-the-art approaches.