Agile Radio Implementation of OFDM Physical Layer for Dynamic Spectrum Access Research

In this paper we present the design process of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) implementation for the Kansas University Agile Radio (KUAR). The KUAR is a portable, experimental, FPGA-based software-defined radio unit employed as a test bed to facilitate advanced research into frequency agile and cognitive radios. The baseband processing in this implementation is accomplished entirely on a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA that is built into the KUAR Our OFDM PHY implementation demonstrates the capabilities of the KUAR and serves as an important first step towards conducting actual experiments on multicarrier schemes for dynamic spectrum access communications, such as non-contiguous (NC)-OFDM.