Performance bounds for Detect and Avoid signal sensing

Detect and Avoid (DAA) is a Cognitive Radio technique for a primary user and secondary users sharing the same spectrum. The DAA spectral sensing system must provide both low decision delay and highly reliable decisions on the presence/absence of primary user transmission. These results provide upper and lower bounds on the decision error rate performance of sensing systems as a function of SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and the number of samples used in the sensing decision. The bounds represent benchmarks on the performances of practical detection systems and give insight into the trade-off between sensing performance and decision delay.