Blind spectrum sensing in cognitive radio over fading channels and frequency offsets

This paper deals with the problem of spectrum sensing in cognitive radio. We consider a stochastic system model where the Primary User (PU) transmits a periodic signal over fading channels. The effect of frequency offsets due to oscillator mismatch, and Doppler offset is studied. We show that for this case the Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) cannot be evaluated pointwise. We present a novel approach to approximate the marginilisation of the frequency offset using a single point estimate. This is obtained via a low complexity Constrained Adaptive Notch Filter (CANF) to estimate the frequency offset. Performance is evaluated via numerical simulations and it is shown that the proposed spectrum sensing scheme can achieve the same performance as the “near-optimal” scheme, that is based on a bank of matched filters, using only a fraction of the complexity required.