A Comparative Analysis between Energy and Maximum Eigenvalue based detection in Cognitive Radio Systems

Cognitive radio (CR) is a kind of “access technology” used to co-exist among more than one radio technology without (or with minimal) interference to each other. Typically, there is one primary user of the spectrum, whereas other users are “allowed” to communicate as long as they don’t interfere the primary user. One of the well-known techniques is to sense the spectrum before initiating the communication in order to analyze the occupancy of radio frequency spectrum. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis between Energy Detection (ED) and Maximum Eigenvalue Detection (MED) spectrum sensing techniques.The performance of these two methods is evaluated in terms of their Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) and their detection probability for different values of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).