A Multi-Carrier Communication Technique for

Interference-Free Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive

Radios
Marilynn P. Wylie-Green
Nokia Siemens Networks
6000 Connection Drive
Irving, Texas 75063
Email: marilynn.green@nsn.com

I. A BSTRACT

in which the data symbols of each user are first modulated

in the time domain and then DFT-spread across the data
subcarriers to yield a signal that is commensurate with a
single carrier modulation. Hence, the envelope fluctuations are
less pronounced and the power efficiency is higher than for
conventional OFDM [2].
In this paper, we introduce a new multi-carrier communication system for the physical layer of future cognitive radio
(CR) systems. While much of the attention in the recent
literature has been on the use of conventional multicarrier
OFDM for CR, herein we discuss a novel scheme that is jointly
based on single carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access
(SC-FDMA) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple
Access (OFDMA). This new transmission model facilitates
interference-free access to multiple radios which might normally transmit data using different physical layer protocols.
Hence, the physical layer of this system would potentially
be inclusive of radios that might normally operate using the
protocols established for OFDM, CPM and/or CDMA. The
basis of our approach is that in order to use as much of the
existing radio architecture as possible, a non-OFDM radio (eg.,
a GSM radio), that is operating as a CR should be able to
construct the same type of physical layer waveform that it
would normally use over the licensed band. However, it is
also desired to use an OFDMA-based access scheme, which
facilitates interference-free transmissions by multiple users.
This paper introduces a new multi-carrier transmission scheme
which advantageously addresses both concerns.
For non-OFDMA radios, an OFDMA style transmission
may be enabled by sampling the complex baseband equivalent
of the waveform generated by the CR. This operation yields
a vector of signal samples. Once converted from serial to
parallel, the resulting data block can be DFT-precoded and
then assigned to a subset of the available data subcarriers
for transmission. By using this physical layer protocol, the
CRs can access the spectrum interference-free. Furthermore,
by mapping the underlying physical layer waveform to a set of
signal samples, this new scheme facilitates CR communication
with minimal impact on the radio architecture, since it only
requires the addition of an OFDM chip set after the core

Future cognitive radio systems are envisioned to accommodate multiple users that are able to co-exist without causing
harmful interference to each other. In this paper, we introduce a
new modulation scheme, based on Single-Carrier FDMA (SCFDMA) and Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA), which enables
interference-free spectrum sharing between radios that operate
over different air interfaces. The basis of our approach is that
non-OFDM signals can be sampled and the resulting data
samples can be used as the data symbols for an SC-FDMA
style transmission.The concept is demonstrated by showing
that a CPM-based radio and a conventional SC-FDMA radio
can transmit over the same shared channel without interfering
and thus without suffering any loss in performance.
II. I NTRODUCTION
Regulatory bodies have determined that most of the radio
frequency spectrum is severely underutilized, and it has been
concluded that spectrum utilization varies greatly. Furthermore, fixed spectrum allocation prohibits those frequencies
that are underutilized from being used by unlicensed users.
Thus, there is a great motivation for allowing unlicensed users
to use licensed bands whenever they will not cause harmful
interference to the incumbent radio system.
Cognitive radio (CR) is a future paradigm for wireless
communications in which a network or a wireless node
changes its transmission or reception parameters in order to
avoid interfering with licensed or unlicensed users during
communication. CR was first presented by Mitola and Maguire
[1].
Much of the emphasis for future CR systems has been
on the adoption of multi-carrier OFDM. For high data rate
communications, OFDM has received a lot of attention in
the past few years. OFDM is a popular broadband wireless
system, which is currently in use in wireless LAN, fixed
broadband wireless access and in digital video and audio
broadcasting. The spectral efficiency of this system is based
on the orthogonality of subcarriers, which provides a way to
pack more subchannels into the same channel spectrum. Single
carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) is a recent variant of OFDM

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Encoder

Decoder

Serial-to-Parallel

Parallel-to-Serial

DFT

IDFT

Subcarrier
Mapping

Inverse
Subcarrier
Mapping

IDFT

DFT

Pulse
Shaping/DAC

Fig. 1.

^D n `

Channel

interleaved subcarrier mapping rule, the resulting time domain

symbols at the output of the IDFT are a scaled replica of the
input symbols. Hence, if the block of data symbols entering
the J-point DFT is given by

= 0 J1 ,
(1)
then the symbols coming out of the DFT are defined as
Ak =

^Ak `

Subcarrier
Mapping

for i = 0, , J 1 and q {0, , Q 1}. These frequency

domain coefficients are transformed back into the time domain
by means of the IDFT operation, which yields

K!J

J
~
T T
K

^D~m `

IDFT
(K-point)

n =

(4)

Now, making the substitution k = q + iQ, it can be shown

that

!
J1
1 X
Ak ej2in/J ej2qn/QJ

n =
(5)
QJ i=0

The generation of transmit symbols for a SC-FDMA modulator.

which readily implies that the post-IDFT sequence,

n actually contains Q scaled replicas of the original input sequence,
n , since
1

n = n ej2qn/QJ
(6)
Q

baseband unit.
III. BACKGROUND
A. Overview of SC-FDMA
Fig. 1 illustrates a block diagram of an SC-FDMA transmission system. In SC-FDMA, a block of time domain data symbols are transformed to the frequency domain by application
of the DFT (also known as DFT-precoding), and then mapped
to a subset of the total available subcarriers. As in OFDMA,
the transmissions from multiple users remain orthogonal due
to the fact that each user is assigned to use a distinct set of the
available subcarriers. However, the advantage of this approach
as compared to OFDMA is that the overall transmit signal is
a single carrier signal, which reduces the PAPR as compared
to conventional multicarrier OFDMA.
In a general SC-FDMA system, there are a total of K
subcarriers, of which J are mapped to a particular user.
In the time domain, the input data symbols have symbol
duration T seconds and the symbol duration is compressed
to T = (J/K) T after going through SC-FDMA modulation,
as noted in Fig. 2.
Although there are different methods available to allocate
the subcarriers, in this paper we consider the I-FDMA mode,
whereby the DFT outputs of the input data corresponding
to a single user are allocated to equidistant subcarriers over
the entire bandwidth. For uplink transmissions, zeros are
inserted in the unused subcarriers (i.e., the subcarriers that are
occupied by other users). As proven in [2], under this regularly

2009 International WD&D Conference

QJ1
1 X j2kn/QJ
Ak e
.
QJ
k=0

K
~
T

J , K : number of data symbols

~
T , T : symbol durations

Fig. 2.

(2)

Assuming that K is an integer multiple of J, (i.e., K = JQ

for some integer Q), the mapped coefficients can be expressed
as

Ai k = q + iQ
Ak =
(3)
0
otherwise.

ADC

^A~ `

n ej2kn/J .

n=0

Block diagram of SC-FDMA modulation.

DFT
(J-point)

J1
X

where n , n mod J.
IV. S IGNAL M ODEL
Fig. 3 illustrates the symbol generation unit that might be
used to communicate with a number of a mixed set of CRs,
some of whom normally communicate using non-OFDM signals and others of which normally use OFDM-based signals.
In order to demonstrate the concept, we present a derivation
for the case where one of the non-OFDM radios normally
operates over a Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) system.
However, the concept can be easily extended to any physical
layer waveform. Before proceeding, however, we review some
of the basic definitions of a CPM waveform.
A. CPM Signal Model
Here we assume that the first Q users normally transmit
CPM waveforms. The complex baseband CPM signal may be
represented as
s(t; ) = exp{j(t; )}
where the phase is a pulse train of the form
X
(t; ) = 2
hi i q(t iT )

(7)

(8)

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N/T
s1 (t )
Q non-OFDM
complex baseband
continuous-time
signals (eg., some
may be CPM,
and some may
be CDMA, etc.)

D conventional
OFDMA data sets
(eg., mixtures of
BPSK, QPSK,
16-QAM, etc.)

0 t < JT

.
.
.

S/P

DFT

S/P

DFT

N/T

sQ (t )
0 t < JT

a k ,1

S/P

a k ,D

S/P

.
.
.

T: symbol interval
N: number of samples per symbol interval
S/P: Serial to Parallel
P/S: Parallel to Serial

Soc Classification level

3
Nokia Siemens Networks

Subcarrier
Mapping

IDFT

P/S

Transmission
Filtering

Cyclic
Prefix

D/A

Presentation / Author / Date

Fig. 4.
Fig. 3.

Performance of single user versus two-user CR system.

Symbol generation for communication to mixed CRs.

all of the symbols that have worked their way through the
frequency pulse and now contribute a constant value to the
overall phase.
The JT second continuous-time signal in is sampled
at rate fsa = N/T to yield the vector of signal

>
s0,q sJN 1,q
samples sq , where sq =
and
sm,q , sq (t; q ) |t=mTsa ; n = 0, . . . , JN 1. The sampling interval is defined as Tsa = 1/fsa . At the receiver, we
propose to use the discrete-time equivalent of a conventional
CPM detector in order to detect the transmitted symbols.
Hence, proper detection at the receiver requires the sample
rate, fsa , to be adequate to provide a faithful representation of
the JT -second continuous-time waveform. Hence, we assume
that the over-sampling ratio satisfies N 2, in which case the
signal vector, sq has a minimum length of 2J.
The transmitter groups the modulation samples into blocks
each containing JN samples. Once the continuous-time waveform of each user has been transformed into its discrete-time
equivalent, the data vector becomes completely analogous to
the vector of data symbols that would be used in a conventional SC-FDMA transmission. Consequently, multiple access
is enabled by the assignment of overlapping but mutually
orthogonal subcarriers to each user.
The next step is to perfom an JN -point DFT, followed by
a linear mapping of the DFT coefficients to the appropriate
set of subcarriers. Finally, the data symbols are transformed
into the time domain and prepared for transmission.

where i is an M -ary symbol, T is the symbol time, hi is

the digital modulation index used during the ith interval that
cycles through a set of Nh possibilities and q(t) is the phase
pulse which is usually thought of as the time-integral of a
frequency pulse F (t) with area 1/2
(
0 t0
(9)
q(t) =
1
t LT,
2
where L (an integer) denotes the signal memory, expressed
in symbol durations. A phase function used to construct CPM
signals is the Raised Cosine (RC). The frequency response for
RC is defined as
(

0 t < LT
1/2LT 1 cos 2t
LT
. (10)
FLRC (t) =
0
otherwise
Rt
and qLRC (t) = 0 FLRC ()d.
During the interval corresponding to the nth symbol, nT
t (n + 1)T , the phase may be expressed as
(t; ) = 2
|

n
X

hi i q(t iT ) +

i=n(L1)

{z

(t; n )

nL
X

hi i

i=0

{z

(11)

nL

where n = n(L1) , , n is the correlative state vector

which contains the L most recent symbols. These L symbols
determine the phase trajectory taken by (t; n ) in (11) during
the interval nT t (n+1)T . There are M L possible values
the correlative state vector can assume, each resulting in a
different phase trajectory. The trellis can be modeled as having
P M L1 states over each symbol interval. When the scheme is
multi-h, then it is also time-varying, with the number of trellis
sections equal to the cardinality of the modulation index set.
The second term in (11), nL , is called the cumulative
phase and represents the contribution to the carrier phase from

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V. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
We demonstrate co-existence between two co-channel CRs.
The first CR normally CPM, using the parameters: M = 4,
raised cosine frequency pulse shaping, signal memory L =
2 and h = 5/16, 6/16. Gray mapping is applied. The CPM
signal is sampled 8 times per symbol interval and it sends
256 symbols per data frame. Hence, its transmission requires
a total of 2048 data subcarriers. The second CR normally sends
BPSK over a conventional OFDMA network and is assigned

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2048 data subcarriers. Thus, the total number of subcarriers is

equal to 4096. The signal-to-interference ratio was 0 dB. The
BER performance is presented in Fig. 3. These results show
that using this physical layer protocol, that the two CRs are
able to co-exist interference-free over the same swathe of the
radio spectrum.
VI. C ONCLUSTION
In this paper, we have presented a new concept to enable
interference-free spectrum sharing between cognitive radios,
some of which normally operate using OFDM-based protocols
and some of which may not. As we have shown, it is possible
to multiplex users that normally use different physical layer interfaces by sampling the complex envelope of the non-OFDM
signals and then transmitting the signal samples over the radio
channel in a SC-FDMA or OFDMA style transmission.
R EFERENCES
[1] J. Mitola and J. G. Maguire, Cognitive radio: Making software radios
more personal, IEEE Personal Communications, pp. 1318, Aug. 1999.
[2] H. G. Myung, J. Lim, and D. Goodman, Peak-to-average power ratio
of single carrier FDMA signals with pulse shaping, in Proc. IEEE
International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), Sep. 2006.

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