Smart antenna‐assisted spectrum sensing for robust detection in cognitive radio networks

SUMMARY In this paper, we consider the problem of multiband spectrum sensing by employing smart antenna arrays at the cognitive receiver. Although energy detection is widely used for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks because of its simplicity and accuracy, it is severely deteriorated by the noise uncertainty. This paper introduces robust spectrum sensing techniques to circumvent this difficulty, which operate simultaneously over the total frequency channels rather than a single channel each time. To enhance the detection performance, the proposed schemes jointly utilize the information of eigenvalues and eigenvectors, signal and noise subspace components in conjunction with the likelihood functions and Gerschgorin radii. Neither subjective decision threshold setting nor the estimation of noise power is required in our schemes, making them robust to noise uncertainty. Simulations are presented to validate the performance of the proposed schemes, and the results show that our schemes can outperform other existing spectrum sensing methods. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.