Reducing the effects of the noise uncertainty in energy detectors for cognitive radio networks

Abstract

SummaryBecause of its ease of implementation and minimum requirements about the primary signals' information, energy detection is broadly considered for signal detection in spectrum sensing algorithms. However, the noise uncertainty phenomenon, caused by the random variations in the noise power, degrades the performance of an energy detector, particularly when the signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) is low. In this work, we propose to reduce the negative effects of the noise uncertainty in the performance of an energy detector by dynamically adapting its detection threshold to the noise conditions experienced at each sensing epoch. The noise power is estimated from the received signal samples using an algorithm based on a high‐pass filters bank and median filtering. With our proposal, it is possible to maintain a constant and low false alarm rate in the presence of noise uncertainty, without increasing the probability of misdetection, even in the low SNR regime, and without increasing the number of samples considered for spectrum sensing. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.