Hybrid detection method for cognitive radio

The basic idea of cognitive radio is to reuse the spectrum whenever it finds the spectrum holes in wireless environment. In cognitive radio spectrum sensing is the fundamental problem. Energy detection method is the simplest method but suffers from noise uncertainty problem. Covariance absolute value exploits space-time signal correlation. In this paper we describe the hybrid detection method which exploits the advantages of two methods. The simulation and comparison is made between covariance absolute value and energy detection for different types of input. Simulation shows that the proposed hybrid detection method outperformed energy detection and covariance absolute value method and is more insensitive to the type of input data.