Spectrum sensing for cognitive radio requires speed and good detection performance at very low SNR ratios. There is no single-stage spectrum sensing technique that is perfect enough to be implemented in practical cognitive radio. In this paper, the authors propose a new parallel fully blind multistage detector. They assume the appropriate stage based on the estimated SNR values that are achieved from the SNR estimator. Energy detection is used in first stage for its simplicity and sensing accuracy at high SNR. For low SNRs, they adopt the maximum eigenvalues detector with different smoothing factor in higher stages. The sensing accuracy for the maximum eigenvalue detector technique improves with higher value of the smoothing factor. However, the computational complexity will increase significantly. They analyze the performance of two cases of the proposed detector: two-stage and three-stage schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed detector improves spectrum sensing in terms of accuracy and speed.
A Cognitive Radio Spectrum Sensing Algorithm to Improve Energy Detection at Low SNR