Two-Stage Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Using Eigenvalues Detection

Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio has difficult and complex requirements, requiring speed and good detection performance at low SNR ratios. As suggested in IEEE 802.22, the primary user signal needs to be detected at SNR = -21dB with a probability of detection exceeds 0.9. Conventional spectrum sensing methods such as the energy detector, which is characterized by simplicity with good detection performance at high SNR values, are ineffective at low SNR values, whereas eigenvalues detection methods have good detection performance at low SNR ratios, but they have high complexity. In this paper, the authors investigate the process of spectrum sensing in two stages: in the first stage (coarse sensing), the energy detector is adopted, while in the second stage (fine sensing), eigenvalues detection methods are used. This method improves performance in terms of probability of detection and computational complexity, as the authors compared the performance of two-stage sensing scheme with ones where only energy detection or eigenvalues detection is performed.