Effect on Detection and False Alarm Probabilities For Various Amplitude Modulation Techniques

Wireless communication has seen rapid development in the past decade, resulting in a growing demand for radio spectrum. Scarcity and under-utilization of radio spectrum became a major obstacle which needed to be dealt with, in order to achieve further advancements. Cognitive Radio overcame this obstacle and is one of the vibrant solutions. The backbone of cognitive radio is spectrum sensing, conventional energy detector technique is used due to its simplicity and effectiveness. The successful use of cognitive radio depends on the capability of a reporting scheme to sense the spectrum. Soft and Hard spectrum sensing schemes have been put to use, to explore which scheme provides more favorable results. Cognitive radio is defined by two essential metrics which are probability of detection and probability of false alarm. There are several modulation techniques by which amplitude modulated signals are generated, namely DSB, SSB and QAM. A detailed analysis is presented for various amplitude modulation techniques which are subjected to cognitive radio technology. A mathematical model has also been presented that explains how each type of modulation eg. DSB, SSB and QAM directly effect probability of detection and probability of false alarm, while using both hard and soft spectrum sensing schemes. The simulation results show that all techniques have considerably close results, so selecting a technique is entirely dependent on the licensed users situation.