Advanced Energy Detector with Correlated Multiple Antennas

In cognitive radio networks where unlicensed secondary users opportunistically access to licensed spectrum unused by licensed primary users, spectrum sensing is one of the key issues in order to effectively use the frequency resource. For enhancing the sensing performance in energy detection-based spectrum sensing, spatial diversity based on multiple antennas is utilized. However, the sensing performance can be degraded when antennas are spatially correlated, resulting in inducing the harmful interference to primary users. To overcome this problem, in this paper, an advanced energy detector is proposed. In the proposed sensing method, a weight matrix based on the eigenvalues of the spatial channels without any prior information on the primary signals is defined and utilized. In numerical simulations, it is shown that the proposed detector outperforms the conventional detector with regard to false-alarm and detection probabilities when antenna are spatially correlated.