Experimental Performance Evaluation of Improved Energy Detection under Noise Uncertainty in Low SNR Regime

Improved energy detection (IED) outperforms classical energy detection (CED) as it takes into consideration the statistics of past samples. However, imperfect knowledge of the noise referred to as noise uncertainty (NU) imposes fundamental limitation on the performance of the sensing scheme. NU is prone to degrade the detection performance particularly in the low signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime. In this paper, the analysis of IED under noise power uncertainty in low SNR regime is carried out validated based on the empirical spectrum data of the radio technologies captured using the experimental setup. Obtained results demonstrate that IED outperforms CED in presence of NU, at the cost of nominal increase in the computational time. A gain of 23.2% in the detection performance is observed while using IED over CED at 1 dB NU, 14.13% at 2 dB NU and 16.67% at 3 dB NU.