Adaptive Spectrum Sensing Algorithm in Cognitive Ultra-wideband Systems

Energy detection is a simple spectrum sensing technique that compares the energy in the received signal with a threshold to determine whether a primary user signal is present or not. Setting the threshold is very important to the performance of the spectrum sensing. This paper proposes an adaptive spectrum sensing algorithm where an optimal decision threshold of energy detection is derived based on minimizing the weighted sum of probabilities of detection and false alarm. Since the optimal decision threshold is dependent on the noise power and signal power, a simple, practical frequency domain approach is devised to estimate both. The algorithm can be used for the detection of various kinds of signals without any prior knowledge of the signal, channel or noise power, and is able to adapt to noise fluctuation. Simulations for detecting narrow-band and wideband signals (phase shift keying signal, frequency shift keying signal, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signal) and ultra-wideband (UWB) signals (direct sequence spread spectrum signals) in an IEEE 802.15.3a UWB band are presented. The results show that the proposed algorithm has excellent robustness to noise uncertainty and outperforms the existing spectrum sensing algorithms in the literature.