The area under a receiver operating characteristic curve over enriched multipath fading conditions

This work is devoted to the analysis of the performance of energy detection based spectrum sensing in the presence of enriched fading conditions which are distinct for the large number of multipath components and the lack of a dominant components. This type of fading conditions are characterized efficiently by the well known Nakagami-q or Hoyt distribution and the proposed analysis is carried out in the context of the area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve (AUC). Unlike the widely used probability of detection metric, the AUC is a single metric and has been shown to be rather capable of evaluating the performance of a detector in applications relating to cognitive radio, radar systems and biomédical engineering, among others. Based on this, novel analytic expressions are derived for the average AUC and its complementary metric, average CAUC, for both integer and fractional values of the involved time-bandwidth product. The derived expressions have a tractable algebraic representation which renders them convenient to handle both analytically and numerically. Based on this, they are employed in analyzing the behavior of energy detection based spectrum sensing over enriched fading conditions for different severity scenarios, which demonstrates that the performance of energy detectors is, as expected, closely related to the value of the fading parameter q.