A Histogram-Based Segmentation Method for Wideband Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radios

This paper presents a new method for automatic radio spectrum segmentation. Spectrum segmentation serves as a first step to identify the subbands that are in use at a certain time, when a wide portion of the spectrum is observed. The proposed method, based on the evaluation of the histogram of the power spectral density of the received signal, is designed for obtaining a low processing complexity and to be implemented in a measurement instrument or a cognitive radio receiver. The proposed method is validated on emulated signals, and the results show good accuracy of the subband boundary estimation and a processing complexity much lower than the other segmentation methods.