Spectrum Sensing of DVB-T2 Signals in Multipath Channels for Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, spectrum sensing of digital video broadcasting-second generation terrestrial (DVB-T2) signals in different fading environments with energy detection (ED) is considered. ED is known to achieve an increased performance among low computational complexity detectors, but it is susceptible to noise uncertainty. By taking into consideration the edge pilot and scattered pilot periodicity in DVB-T2 signals, a low computational complex noise power estimator is proposed. It is shown analytically that the choice of detector depends on the environment, the detector requirements, the available prior knowledge and with the noise power estimator. Simulation confirm that with the noise power estimator, ED significantly outperforms the pilot correlation-based detectors. Simulation also show that the proposed scheme enables ED to obtain increased detection performance in fading channels.