INVESTIGATION OF APERTURE LEVEL SPATIAL AND FREQUENCY FILTERING ON RADAR AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEM PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and cognitive radio (CR) systems, built on software-defined radio (SDR) platforms, enable adaptive spectrum use and reconfiguration. Reconfigurable and filtering antennas play a crucial role in DSA, reducing the need for extra filtering circuits and rejecting out-of-band (OOB) signals. However, a comprehensive analysis of their role in SDR-based DSA system performance is yet to be conducted. This work introduces a novel SDR-based test system emulating frequency-variant interference, evaluating traditional broadband, reconfigurable, and filtering antennas by measuring received interference power and signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) in congested environments. The study shows that reconfigurable filtering antennas enhance OOB interference rejection and offer superior performance in size, weight, and power (SWaP) constrained environments, highlighting their potential for improved system-level performance in congested spectrum scenarios.