Performance of Detectors for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Under Laplacian Noise

Abstract

Electronic systems in general can be impaired by impulsive noise generated by a variety of sources. Spectrum sensors are of particular interest herein, since their probabilities of detection and false alarm can be severely degraded under this impairment. Several models for impulsive noise have been studied in the literature, all of them having the common characteristic of being well represented by heavy-tailed probability density functions, like Laplace and some Stable distributions. This article addresses the performances of state-of-the-art detectors for cooperative spectrum sensing when the received signal is impaired by Laplacian noise. This is made by means of estimating the probability of detection for a fixed false alarm rate, when important system parameters are varied. It is demonstrated that the robustness against impulsive noise varies significantly depending on the adopted detection strategy.