A new spectral correlation approach to spectrum sensing for 802.22 WRAN system

As the mobile communication environments grow rapidly, much attention has been paid on the use of spectrum resources. Recently, a new technology called Cognitive Radio (CR) was developed for using the unused spectrum band efficiently. In the CR systems, one possible approach is to allocate the unused spectrum band to the usage spectrum band provided by spectrum sensing technique. In this paper, we propose a new spectral correlation based signal feature detection method for spectrum sensing. To improve spectrum sensing sensitivity, the proposed method computes the autocorrelation of received signal before the spectral correlation detection. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides better performance of spectrum sensing than conventional spectral correlation detection method even in the low SNR environment.