A reliable spectrum sensing scheme using sample covariance matrix for cognitive radio

In this paper, a reliable spectrum sensing scheme based on sample covariance matrix of received signal at secondary user is proposed. The reliability in terms of sufficient protection to primary user (PU) from the interference caused by secondary user (SU). The energy based spectrum sensing method is highly vulnerable at noise uncertainty and covariance based method overcomes it. However, the performance of existing covariance based method degrades at low signal to noise ratio (SNR). The problem of performance degradation at low SNR is addressed by proposed reliable spectrum sensing scheme. The reliable spectrum sensing method overcomes the low SNR and noise uncertainty problem and outperform the existing spectrum sensing schemes. The simulation results show that the presented method performs better than existing spectrum sensing methods.