Adaptive nonlinear interference suppressor for cognitive radio applications

To utilize the radio frequency spectrum efficiently a Cognitive Radio (CR) can operate as a secondary user in a frequency band which is licensed to a primary user. To this end, the CR must sense the spectrum continuously to find empty frequency channels for its transmission. The transmitted signal by the local transmitter of the CR, however, induces a strong local interference in the local receiver of the CR. Hence a half-duplex transceiver is used where the transmit and sense operations are done in separate time slots. The time-slotted operation though, reduces the throughput of the CR. This paper proposes application of an adaptive Nonlinear Interference Suppressor (NIS) to suppress this strong local interference to enable simultaneous transmit and sense. We present experimental results of a transceiver testbed that uses an implementation of the NIS, fabricated in 140 nm CMOS technology. These experiments show that the NIS can substantially suppress the local interference with low complexity and power consumption.