Spectrum Sensing of OFDM Signals Utilizing Higher Order Statistics under Noise Uncertainty Environments in Cognitive Radio Systems

Cognitive radio (CR) is an important issue to solve the spectrum scarcity problem for modern and forthcoming wireless communication systems. Spectrum sensing is the ability of the CR systems to sense the primary user signal to detect an ideal portion of the radio spectrum. Spectrum sensing is mandatory to solve the spectrum scarcity problem and the interference problem of the primary user. Noise uncertainty consideration for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmitted signals in severe noise environments is a challenging issue for measuring the performance of spectrum sensing. This paper proposed a method using higher order statistics (HOS) functions including skewness and kurtosis for improving the sensing performance of a cyclic prefix (CP) based OFDM transmitted signal for noise uncertainty. The detection performance of OFDM systems is measured for various CP sizes using a higher order digital modulation technique over a multipath Rayleigh fading channel for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) cases. In the proposed method, the CP-based OFDM transmitted signal sensing performance is measured and compared with the conventional methods under noise uncertainty environments. Through comprehensive evaluation of simulation, it is demonstrated that the sensing performance of this method significantly outperforms conventional schemes in the case of noise uncertainty in severe noise environments.