Block-time of arrival/leaving estimation to enhance local spectrum sensing under the practical traffic of primary user

With a long sensing period, the inter-frame spectrum sensing in IEEE 802.22 standard is vulnerable to the effect of the traffic of the primary user (PU). In this article, we address the two degrading factors that affect the inter-frame sensing performance with respect to the random arrival/leaving of the PU traffic. They are the noise-only samples under the random arrival traffic, and the PU-signal-contained samples under the random leaving traffic. We propose the model in which the intra-frame sensing cooperates with the inter-frame one, and the inter-frame sensing uses the time-of-arrival (ToA), and time-of-leave (ToL) detectors to reduce the two degrading factors in the inter-frame sensing time. These ToA and ToL detectors are used to search for the sample which contains either the ToA or ToL of the PU traffic, respectively, which allows the partial cancelation of the unnecessary samples. At the final stage, the remaining samples are input into a primary user detector, which is based on the energy detection scheme, to determine the status of PU traffic in the inter-frame sensing time. The analysis and the simulation results show that the proposed scheme enhances the spectrum-sensing performance compared to the conventional counter-part.