Spectrum Sensing Using a Uniform Uncalibrated Linear Antenna Array for Cognitive Radios

In this paper, we study the spectrum sensing problem when the sensing device is equipped with an uncalibrated multiantenna array. We consider an unknown Toeplitz structure for the covariance matrix of the signal of interest and unknown uncorrelated noise variances. We propose two new invariant constant false-alarm rate detectors with less computational cost than the generalized likelihood ratio test: (1) the Rao test and (2) a separating function estimation test (SFET). We calculate approximate expressions for the false-alarm and detection probabilities of the proposed Rao test-based detector. In addition, we derive the exact false-alarm probability of the proposed SFET for the case of two antennas. Moreover, we obtain an accurate approximation for the false-alarm probability of the proposed SFET for the general case using the method of moments. The accuracy of these expressions is validated by Monte-Carlo experiments. The simulation results show that the proposed detectors outperform state-of-the-art detectors.