A review and verification of detection algorithms for DVB-T signals

With the evolution of new services and widespread wireless applications, it is inevitable that there will be intense demand on the radio spectrum resources in the future. Cognitive radio (CR) technology has the potential to optimize the radio spectrum utilization. One of the areas of its application appears to be in Digital TV band. CR technology will have the ability to access the unused radio spectrum (white space) by identifying spectrum holes. One of the essential requirements for this operation is to detect the presence of the primary signal (TV signal in this case). In this paper, several recently proposed temporal detection algorithms, which are suitable for DVB-T signals are reviewed, simulated and their performance verified. The results obtained from various methods are compared.