An Adaptive Multitaper-SVD Spectrum Sensing Method for OFDM-Based Cognitive Radio Systems

Cognitive radio (CR) has been proposed and widely investigated as an approach for increasing the spectrum efficiency. CR devices exploit so called white spaces in the spectrum allocated to the primary users (PU) by a process commonly referred to as the spectrum sensing. In this work, we use the singular value decomposition (SVD) for spectrum sensing in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based (OFDM) CR systems. A single input multiple output channel is assumed between the PU and the secondary user equipped with multiple antennas. At the CR side, the multitaper method (MTM) is used for the spectrum sensing in each antenna. As a first contribution, we aim at reducing the time necessary to perform spectrum sensing. To this end, we propose an adaptive MTM–SVD spectrum sensing method that decreases the sensing time. As a second contribution, we formulate a three dimensional SVD (referred to as 3-D SVD) scheme that efficiently processes signals and quantities related to multiple antenna traffic, OFDM multiple blocks and different tapers, simultaneously. Simulation results indicate that the proposed adaptive MTM–SVD decreases the sensing time by about 61–69 % for various proposed adaptive algorithms, compared to the conventional MTM–SVD method. Besides, performance improvement in probability of detection is achieved from 2–13 % for a predefined probability of false alarm by using adaptive MTM–SVD. In addition to further reduction of the sensing time, the proposed 3D-MTM–SVD outperforms conventional methods for the low probability of the false alarm.