Reconfigurable Architecture for Spatial Sensing in Wideband Radio Front-End

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reconfigurable hardware architecture for spatial sensing in wideband radio systems, enabling efficient detection and direction-of-arrival estimation of signals in non-contiguous spectrum using sub-Nyquist sampling and dynamic reconfiguration.

Contribution

It presents a novel reconfigurable architecture combining sparse antenna arrays and sub-Nyquist sampling for spatial sensing, implemented on Zynq SoC with hardware-software co-design and dynamic partial reconfiguration.

Findings

Architecture effectively performs spatial sensing on SNS samples.

Resource utilization and execution time are optimized across configurations.

Dynamic reconfiguration enables adaptive sensing based on active signals.

Abstract

The deployment of cellular spectrum in licensed, shared and unlicensed spectrum demands wideband sensing over non-contiguous sub-6 GHz spectrum. To improve the spectrum and energy efficiency, beamforming and massive multi-antenna systems are being explored which demand spatial sensing i.e. blind identification of vacant frequency bands and direction-of-arrival (DoA) of the occupied bands. We propose a reconfigurable architecture to perform spatial sensing of multi-band spectrum digitized via wideband radio front-end comprising of the sparse antenna array (SAA) and Sub-Nyquist Sampling (SNS). The proposed architecture comprises SAA pre-processing and algorithms to perform spatial sensing directly on SNS samples. The proposed architecture is realized on Zynq System on Chip (SoC), consisting of the ARM processor and FPGA, via hardware-software co-design (HSCD). Using the dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR), on-the-fly switching between algorithms depending on the number of active signals in the sensed spectrum is enabled. The functionality, resource utilization, and execution time of the proposed architecture are analyzed for various HSCD configurations, word-length, number of digitized samples, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and antenna array (sparse/non-sparse).