Channel Sensing without Quiet Period for Cognitive Radio Systems: A Pilot Cancellation Approach

The cognitive radio (CR) systems usually arrange for the quiet period to detect the primary user (PU) effectively. Since all CR users do not transmit any data during quiet period, the interference caused by other CR users can be prevented in the channel sensing for PU detection. Even though the quiet period improves the PU detection performance, it degrades the channel utilization of CR system. To cope with this problem, we propose a channel sensing scheme without quiet period, which is based on the pilot cancellation, and analyze its performance. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme highly outperforms the existing PU detection schemes.