| Abstract: | Spectrum sensing is an elementary function in cognitive radio designed to monitor the existence of a primary user (PU). To achieve a high rate of detection, most techniques rely on knowledge of prior spectrum patterns, with a trade‐off between high computational complexity and long sensing time. On the other hand, blind techniques ignore pattern matching processes to reduce processing time, but their accuracy degrades greatly at low signal‐to‐noise ratios. To achieve both a high rate of detection and short sensing time, we propose fast spectrum sensing with coordinate system (FSC) — a novel technique that decomposes a spectrum with high complexity into a new coordinate system of salient features and that uses these features in its PU detection process. Not only is the space of a buffer that is used to store information about a PU reduced, but also the sensing process is fast. The performance of FSC is evaluated according to its accuracy and sensing time against six other well‐known conventional techniques through a wireless microphone signal based on the IEEE 802.22 standard. FSC gives the best performance overall. |
