A low power reconfigurable channel filter using multi-band and masking architecture for channel adaptation in cognitive radio

Cognitive radio (CR) is an adaptive spectrum sharing paradigm targeted to provide opportunistic spectrum access to secondary users for whom the frequency bands have not been licensed. The key tasks in a CR are to sense the spectral environment over a wide frequency band and allow unlicensed secondary users (CR users) to dynamically transmit/ receive data over frequency bands unutilized by licensed primary users. Thus the CR transceiver should dynamically adapt its channel (frequency band) in response to the time-varying frequencies of wideband signal for seamless communication. In this paper, we present a low complexity reconfigurable filter architecture based on multi-band filtering and frequency masking techniques for dynamic channel adaptation in CR terminal. The proposed multi-standard architecture is capable of adapting to channels having different bandwidths corresponding to the channel spacing of timevarying channels. Design examples show that proposed architecture offers 12.2% power reduction and 26.5% average gate count reduction over conventional Per-Channel based architecture.