Spectrum Sensing Based on Higher Order Statistics for OFDM Systems over Multipath Fading Channels in Cognitive Radio

Abstract

Spectrum sensing is an important issue in cognitive radio (CR) systems for solving spectrum scarcity problems in wireless communication systems. This paper presents a semiblind spectrum-sensing method utilizing higher order statistics including the skewness and kurtosis functions. The proposed method improves the detection performance while increasing its computational complexity, where an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-transmitted signal over multipath fading channels is considered. Through comprehensive evaluation by simulations, it is shown that the proposed spectrum-sensing method significantly outperforms the conventional schemes for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) cases.