Communication systems across a variety of applications are increasingly using the angular domain to improve spectrum management. They require new sensing architectures to perform energy-efficient measurements of the electromagnetic environment that can be deployed in a variety of use cases. This paper presents the Directional Spectrum Sensor (DSS), a compressive sampling (CS) based analog-to-information converter (CS-AIC) that performs spectrum scanning in a focused beam. The DSS offers increased spectrum sensing sensitivity and interferer tolerance compared to omnidirectional sensors. The DSS implementation uses a multi-antenna beamforming architecture with local oscillators that are modulated with pseudo random waveforms to obtain CS measurements. The overall operation, limitations, and the influence of wideband angular effects on the spectrum scanning performance are discussed. Measurements on an experimental prototype are presented and highlight improvements over single antenna, omnidirectional sensing systems.

2022 IEEE 95th Vehicular Technology Conference: (VTC2022-Spring)