Sensing performance of energy detector in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

In order to increase the spectral efficiency of any communication systems, spectrum sensing techniques may be used for proficient utilization of inadequate spectrum resources. It identifies the unused spectrum holes, which is originally assigned to the primary users (PU). These spectrum holes are then assigned to the secondary or cognitive users with avoiding interference to the primary users. In this paper, a spectrum assignment technique based on energy detection technique is proposed. This enhanced energy detection technique works well at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which makes the communication system more power efficient and can be for low power applications. Further, the performance of the proposed spectrum sensing method is examined for cognitive radio (CR) network. The performance of the proposed method is also examined by calculating the probability of detection, probability of false alarm and error probability in presence of additive Gaussian noise and the effect of different sensing parameters on the probability of error in detecting primary users are also evaluated.