Single-channel spectrum sensing technique based on sub-Nyquist sampling

Spectrum sensing technique for wideband analog signals has been applied widely in cognitive radio. At first, signal duration is divided into time slices of fixed length, which is based on the idea of time-division. Secondly, signal slices multiply by a bank of periodic waveforms which are produced by pseudorandom number generators; the product is filtered by low-pass filter and is sampled at a sub-Nyquist rate. Finally, samples are used to calculate band locations of the signals. Compared with the multi-channel structure of spectrum sensing, the structure in this paper is simpler and also has the ability to perform spectrum sensing with low-rate samples. Numerical simulations show that, this technique can perform spectrum sensing effectively with low-rate samples without prior knowledge of the band locations of the signals.