Spectrum sensing for wireless communications using energy ratio and beamforming

In this paper, a new spectrum sensing (SS) method, called maximum-to-mean energy detector (MMED), is proposed. Considering a wireless communication system with many angles of arrival (AoA), the suggested method is based on beamforming and the ratio of the maximum energy to the mean one of the received signal. The proposal is totally blind and it does not require the knowledge of the signal, the channel or the noise power. Theoretical development of the detection threshold and the performance analysis of the method are first provided. Then, simulation results show an interesting performance of MMED compared to the well-known blindly combined energy detection (BCED) under very low signal to noise ratio (SNR).