A Robust Hyperbolic Tangent-Based Energy Detector With Gaussian and Non-Gaussian Noise Environments in Cognitive Radio System

Spectrum sensing is important for a cognitive radio (CR) system to protect primary users (PUs) from harmful interference. At present, most of the existing sensing schemes are proposed in Gaussian noise environments. Nevertheless, a CR system actually also suffers from non-Gaussian noise, such as man-made impulsive noise, ultrawideband interference and co-channel interference. In this article, to handle the degradation of detection performance in non-Gaussian impulsive noise environments, a robust spectrum sensing scheme named hyperbolic tangent-based energy detector (HT-ED) is proposed. The hyperbolic tangent function is applied to suppress the impulsive noise by the nonlinear behavior, but without restraining the normal noise by the linear behavior. This property enables the new method to achieve the good detection performance in both Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise environments. In addition, it is similar to an energy detector, the new detector does not need to know the characteristics of the PU's signal. The performance analysis of the proposed HT-ED scheme is also presented. The simulation results show the HT-ED is robust against impulsive noise, which is modeled as Laplace or α-stable noise. Moreover, the HT-ED provides a superior detection performance compared with the other existing relative methods in a wide range of non-Gaussian noise.