A design of multi-cycle detector for cognitive radios

Abstract

Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising technology. The most fundamental problem of CR is spectrum sensing. Energy detector is often considered for spectrum sensing in CR, and if the noise power is exactly known, energy detector has admirable performance. However, in practice, noise power is always inexactly known. To solve this problem, Dandawate [Dandawate et al. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 1994, 42(9): 2355-2369] has proposed a nonparametric single-cycle detector based on cyclostationarity, which is robust to noise uncertainty. In this paper, based on Dandawate's single-cycle detector, a joint multi-cycle detector is further proposed, which is also nonparametric and immune from noise uncertainty. Simulation results have shown the validity and superiority over single-cycle detector of the proposed detector.