Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radios Based on Multiple Cumulants

In cognitive radios, energy detector is considered for spectrum sensing in the literature. However, its performance deteriorates rapidly when noise power is fluctuating. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a spectrum sensing method based on multiple cumulants. Although cumulant-based detection methods have been extensively studied, they usually consider a single cumulant of a certain order and a certain lag. Therefore, they only make limited use of the rich statistical information contained in the signal. The proposed detection method is based on multiple cumulants of arbitrary orders and arbitrary lags hence it is superior and more flexible. In addition, the proposed detector is nonparametric in the sense that it does not require any exact prior knowledge about the signal or the noise, such as noise power or cyclic frequencies. Thus it is immune from noise uncertainty. Simulation experiments are provided to show the validity and the superiority over single-cumulant based detector of the proposed multicumulant based detector.