An Alternative Energy Detection Using Sliding Window for Cognitive Radio System

Cognitive radio is one of the most effective techniques to improve the spectrum utilization efficiency. To implement the cognitive radio, spectrum sensing is considered as the key functionality because secondary users should identify the spectrum holes and utilize them efficiently without causing interference to primary users. In generally, there are three major spectrum sensing methods, including matched filter, energy detection and feature detection. The most common and simplest method is energy detection. However, the conventional energy detection suffers from large degradation in performance under low SNR environment. In this paper, we proposed alternative energy detection which can estimate the exact power of primary user without the noise effect and lead to the better performance. In order to reduce the effect of noise fluctuation, the sliding window function is utilized to assist the proposed detector. The simulation result shows that our proposed method outperform conventional one.