A Real-Time Spectrum Sensing Platform Using Software-Defined Radio for TV White Spaces

This paper presents a real-time spectrum sensing platform for TV White Space (TVWS) applications based on Software-Defined Radio (SDR) and experimentally validated under realistic propagation conditions. The proposed system employs the Ettus USRP N210 and MATLAB to perform energy detection-based sensing over Ultra High Frequency (UHF) television channels compliant with the ISDB-TB standard. Experimental evaluations are conducted in wired and wireless environments, including line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (nLoS) scenarios, considering different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels and numbers of collected samples. The obtained results demonstrate close agreement between theoretical and experimental performance trends, validating the reliability of the implemented sensing system in practical environments. In addition, the analyses show the impact of multipath propagation and fading conditions on sensing performance, evidencing the limitations of idealized theoretical channel models in real wireless scenarios. The developed SDR platform demonstrates the feasibility of lowcost real-time spectrum sensing for future TVWS-based cognitive radio, 5G, and 6G systems.