An interference estimation technique for Satellite cognitive radio systems

The increasing request of communication capacity for the introduction of modern multimedia services has collided with the problem of the spectrum shortage. One of the most known approach is represented by cognitive radios, which are supposed to exploit already deployed frequency bands in use by an incumbent system. Among other cognitive radio features, detection and estimation of the incumbent user are essential for implementing the cognitive radio system avoiding any interference. This is particularly important in SatCom cognitive scenarios due to transmission power impairments. In this paper, we focus on a joint interference and noise estimation algorithm aiming at detecting and estimating incumbent interference, for allowing the coexistence of the two systems. The behavior of the algorithm is analytically derived, and numerical results obtained through computer simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.