Multiple antenna spectrum sensing in cognitive radios

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of spectrum sensing by using multiple antenna in cognitive radios when the noise and the primary user signal are assumed as independent complex zero-mean Gaussian random signals. The optimal multiple antenna spectrum sensing detector needs to know the channel gains, noise variance, and primary user signal variance. In practice some or all of these parameters may be unknown, so we derive the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) detectors under these circumstances. The proposed GLR detector, in which all the parameters are unknown, is a blind and invariant detector with a low computational complexity. We also analytically compute the missed detection and false alarm probabilities for the proposed GLR detectors. The simulation results provide the available traded-off in using multiple antenna techniques for spectrum sensing and illustrates the robustness of the proposed GLR detectors compared to the traditional energy detector when there is some uncertainty in the given noise variance.