A highly efficient approach for performance enhancement of multiple antenna elements based spectrum sensing techniques using side lobe level reduction

Abstract

Spectrum sensing (SS) is substantial demand for enabling cognitive radio (CR) systems. In recent years, digital beamforming (DBF) is exploited for performance enhancement of multiple antenna elements or uniform linear array (ULA) based spectrum sensing techniques. Generally, a ULA suffers from its high side lobe level (SLL) and has a relatively low realized array gain. Subsequently, the ULA-based CR receiver is compelled to provide low detection performance. Furthermore, the efforts to increase the realized array gain are still not sufficient to dramatically increase the detection performance, because the problem of high SLL remains a challenging issue. In this paper, a highly efficient approach is introduced for performance enhancement of ULA-based SS techniques using side lobe level reduction (SLLR) beamforming that is applied to the receiving ULA. Worthy, a large SLLR combined with maintaining the same half power beamwidth (HPBW) as the original array, results in a synthesized array with a significantly improved gain. Thence, both the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of the combined received signal are significantly enhanced at the CR receiver, which would considerably increase the detection capability of the proposed system. The proposed approach is investigated by integrating the SLLR-based antenna array with the generalized likelihood ratio test/direction of arrival (GLRT/DOA)-based SS technique that is denoted as GD technique. In contrast to the ULA, the synthesized array's excitation coefficients are non-uniform, necessitating special signal processing to incorporate it in the received signal model and derive closed-form expressions for the probability of detection, probability of false alarm, and decision threshold, all of which are already reported in this work. Several simulation scenarios are performed to validate the supremacy of the proposed SS approach compared to the traditional single antenna element based techniques and other state of the art beamforming based techniques.