A Multitaper Spectrum Based Detector for Cognitive Radio

Fully exploiting the phase and magnitude information in received data is crucial to the detection of cognitive radio signals, and this is usually done in the time domain. In fact, the same set of information can also be exploited in the frequency domain in the form of power spectrum. The most appealing one is the multitaper spectrum (MTS) estimator, which enjoys a high estimation accuracy and relatively low computational complexity making it an attractive candidate for use in CR networks. In this paper, we investigate a MTS-based CR detector, aiming to fully understand its capability in exploiting the advantage of MTS. We obtain simple expressions for detection probability and constant false-alarm rate whereby a threshold can be easily determined. Numerical results are presented to verify the theory and to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme.