Development and performance evaluation of blind eigenvalue to noise power ratio detector for co-operative spectrum sensing

Cognitive Radio (CR) is considered as a significant evolution in wireless communication. Spectrum sensing is one of the important issues of the CR. This paper proposes a blind technique for cooperative spectrum sensing in MIMO scenario. The proposed algorithm employs the ratio of maximum eigenvalue of sample covariance matrix to the estimated noise power, as test statistic for achieving improved spectrum sensing. The expression for probability of false alarm is calculated using random matrix theories (RMT). Based on this, expressions for threshold and probability of detection are formulated. Simulation results of proposed method are obtained and verified with other spectrum sensing methods. The comparison demonstrates superior performance of the proposed method over the other methods.