Design and simulation of a radio spectrum monitoring system with a software-defined network

This paper proposes a software-defined network architecture for a radio spectrum monitoring system that aims to help regulate spectrum allocation and usage management for nationwide commercial or civilian wireless communication systems. The proposed software-defined network architecture provides radio spectrum monitoring with the ability to coordinate the demand for communication bandwidth between the control workstations and the monitoring stations, using software-defined radio devices. To evaluate the proposed architecture, a testbed is designed that incorporates two versions of the Dijkstra algorithm to route the monitored data over the simulated software-defined network. Several metrics are used to measure the transmission performance, including packet loss rate, packet jitter, throughput, path cost, and average link utilization. The results of applying the proposed software-defined network architecture to a radio spectrum monitoring system in order to fulfill high traffic load requirements with software-defined radio technologies are promising.