Signal Contiguity Based Wideband Spectrum Sensing for Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems

This paper investigates energy detection based wideband spectrum sensing for dynamic spectrum access (DSA) systems. The licensed frequency band of interest is resolved into a series of contiguous frequency bins via the FFT engine of the detector. By employing forward consecutive mean excision (FCME) algorithm and exploiting primary user (PU) signal's contiguity in frequency domain, computationally simple pre-processing of raw spectrum observation data and post-detection processing of decisions are proposed to perform frequency bin cluster based spectrum sensing. It is verified through simulations that these signal contiguity based sensing schemes can significantly increase the PU signal detection rate while at the same time maintaining the false-alarm rate sufficiently close to the desired constant one.