Multiantenna-Cognitive-Radio-Based Blind Spectrum Sensing under Correlated Signals and Unequal Signal and Noise Powers

Abstract

Adopting cognitive radios (CRs) having multiple antennas in blind non-cooperative and cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) under fading channels has gained attention due to higher detection performances provided by the spatial diversity gain of multi-sensors in different geographical locations and lower complexity, respectively. However, most studies do not consider sensing scenarios of more practical significance: for example, sometimes adopting only uncalibrated antenna arrays and sometimes only correlated signals at antenna arrays of CRs, but almost always, none of these impairments. Therefore, this paper studies these combined impairments on the performances of two blind techniques in centralized CSS with decision fusion (DF) and data fusion for different numbers of CRs and antennas per CR, both under frequency selective fading channels. One is the circular folding cooperative power spectral density split cancellation (CFCPSC), and the other is the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). Extensive numerical results show, for instance, that with sample fusion (SF) and calibrated antennas, GLRT outperforms CFCPSC independently of correlation, numbers of antennas, or CRs. However, uncalibrated antennas severely penalize GLRT while surprisingly benefiting CFCPSC. Correlation is detrimental to GLRT and CFCPSC with SF but may help CFCPSC in DF and GLRT in DF or eigenvalue fusion. Generally, CFCPSC outperforms GLRT.