A new spectrum sensing method for OFDM-based cognitive radios

Spectrum sensing is one of the most important technologies for Cognitive Radio communications. Motivated by the infeasibility of synchronization, a spectrum sensing method based on the pilot for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is proposed. The proposed spectrum sensing method estimates the pilot utilizing its periodicity and Central Limit Theorem (CLT). After that we use an optimal test to detect the signal based on the Neyman-Pearson (NP) Criterion. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain higher detection probability than the algorithms in the literature under a constant false alarm rate.