Overview of spectrum sensing for cognitive radio

Abstract

We present a survey of state-of-the-art algorithms for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio. The algorithms discussed range from energy detection to sophisticated feature detectors. The feature detectors that we present all have in common that they exploit some known structure of the transmitted signal. In particular we treat detectors that exploit cyclostationarity properties of the signal, and detectors that exploit a known eigenvalue structure of the signal covariance matrix. We also consider cooperative detection. Specifically we present data fusion rules for soft and hard combining, and discuss the energy efficiency of several different sensing, sleeping and censoring schemes in detail.