| The current command-and-control regulatory structure for licensing the RF spectrum has been unable to cope with the growing demand for spectrum. This has given rise to an 'artificial scarcity' of usable spectrum. Numerous studies have thus begun to examine how the licensed spectrum is actually used, with the goal of not only reforming the spectrum licensing regime but also opening certain underutilized spectrum to unlicensed secondary usage. The technologies such as frequency agile radios and dynamic spectrum access networks can enable unlicensed users to access the underutilized spectrum in a manner that is transparent to the licensed users.; A thorough understanding of the spectrum utilization and interference issues can be helpful in devising solutions to maximize the spectrum utilization and assist in the design of secondary spectrum access technologies. A spectrum survey can be conducted in order to collect data on spectrum utilization and process the data in order to extract useful information about the spectrum activity.; In this thesis, a generic framework for spectrum surveying has been proposed. This framework outlines the procedures and techniques for the collection, analysis and modeling of spectrum measurements. Techniques have been proposed to perform analysis and extract important parameters of spectrum occupancy. The proposed framework introduces standardization to spectrum surveying as well as automation to the processing of the measurements. The proposed processing techniques have been tested on spectrum measurements collected from the FM band, TV bands, cellular band, and paging band and the results are also presented.; The television spectrum is being underutilized, making it a prime candidate for dynamic spectrum access. Nevertheless, the quality of this spectrum for enabling secondary transmissions has never been assessed. The proposed spectrum survey framework has been implemented and used to examine how non-ideal transmission properties of television broadcasts can potentially impair the performance of secondary transmissions. The framework has also been incorporated into a novel wideband spectrum sensing architecture. The thesis presents the results of the feasibility study as well as simulation results obtained for the proposed spectrum sensing architecture. |
