Effect of dynamic threshold on sensing duration for robust detection in cognitive radio systems for low SNR scenarios

Abstract

Cognitive Radio aims at solving the spectrum scarcity issue and Spectrum sensing seems to be the quintessence of the cognitive radio system. The performance of a spectrum sensing method is scrutinized by classical parameters like detection probability, false alarm probability and sensing duration. These parameters are affected in practical scenarios by noise uncertainty and fixed threshold concept. This paper revisits the energy detection technique for sensing the spectrum and attempts to improve the sensing duration and detection probability in an uncertain noise environment with low SNR. An approach to relate sensing duration with dynamic threshold is presented which can help to achieve desirable and robust performance in terms of probability of detection at low SNR in presence of noise uncertainty factor.