Spectrum sensing in cognitive radios based on enhanced energy detector

Spectrum sensing is regarded as a key technology in cognitive radio (CR). Energy detector has been performed as an alternative spectrum sensing method because of its low computational complexity and not requiring a priori information of the primary signal. This study proposes an enhanced energy detector by making an arbitrary positive power operation of the received signal amplitude instead of the squaring operation in the traditional energy detector (TED). The detection probability of the proposed detector is theoretically derived under a constant false alarm probability in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Performance analysis and simulation results indicate that the enhanced energy detector with the optimum power operation outperforms the traditional energy detector, especially in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime.