Spectrum Sensing for OFDM Systems Employing Pilot Tones and Application to DVB-T OFDM

Spectrum sensing is one of the core technologies of cognitive radio (CR) systems which provide a viable solution to the problem of sparsity of wireless spectrum. Nowadays, OFDM techniques are adopted by many existing or progressing wireless communication standards. Thus, a robust spectrum sensing algorithm for OFDM modulated signals is highly desired to implement CR when the primary signal uses OFDM modulation. Motivated by this demand, a time-domain symbol cross-correlation based spectrum sensing algorithm (TDSC method) is presented in this paper. The algorithm makes use of the property that the mean of the TDSC of two OFDM symbols is not zero if they have embedded the same frequency-domain pilot tones. The statistical behavior of the proposed spectrum sensor is explicitly analyzed and a theoretical lower bound on the misdetection probability is derived in this paper. An intuitive spectrum sensing method which utilizes the cyclic prefix nature of the OFDM modulated signals (CP method) is also described in this paper as a reference for comparison. Finally, we use the DVB-T Standard [8] as an application example to illustrate the proposed spectrum sensing algorithm. The simulated channel environments are the Ricean and Rayleigh channels defined in the DVB-T Standard and the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Four CP ratios defined in the DVB-T Standard are simulated for the probability of false alarm equaling 0.01 and the sensing time set equal to 50 ms. Simulation results show that the TDSC method can achieve a misdetection probability of 0.1 when the SNR equals -20.5 dB for all four CP ratios. The TDSC method outperforms the CP method in all cases. Furthermore, the proposed method has approximately the same detection performance for different CP ratios while the detection performance of the CP method degrades dramatically when the CP ratio becomes small. Results also reveal that the simulated performance is very close to the theoretical lower bound indicating that the lower bound can be used as a good prediction of performance.