An Energy Detection-Based Spectrum-Sensing Method for Cognitive Radio

Energy detection (ED) method is one of the most commonly used signal-sensing methods in spectrum sensing due to its low implementation complexity. ED can achieve good detection performance when the noise variance is known. However, in most cases, the noise variance is estimated, which may result in the uncertainty in noise variance. In the presence of noise variance uncertainty, the detection performance of the ED method may degrade significantly. To reduce the impact of uncertainty in noise variance, an ED-based sensing method is proposed in this paper. This method combines these signal samples sampled by multiple antennas to obtain the decision statistic as ED does. A novel technique is proposed to construct the decision threshold so that it is independent of the noise variance. As a consequence, the proposed method is free of the effect of noise variance uncertainty, and the noise variance estimation is not need. The simulation results show that the detection probability of this method can approach to 1 even when the SNR is −15 dB while the detection probability of ED is below 0.8, which means the detection performance of the proposed method can outperform the ED method without the noise variance estimation when the number of antennas is greater than two.