Two-stage spectrum sensing for cognitive radio under noise uncertainty

The robustness to uncertainty of noise power is one of main challenges to spectrum sensing technique. Since the occurrence of noise power uncertainty causes the detection performance of spectrum sensing techniques significantly degrade. In this paper, we propose two novel schemes of two-stage spectrum sensing for cognitive radio under environment as noise power uncertainty. The two-stage spectrum sensing technique combines two conventional spectrum sensing techniques to perform spectrum sensing by exploiting their individual advantages. The proposed two-stage spectrum sensing scheme exploits the merits of ED, MME and CAV techniques to determine the existence of the primary user. The ED performs spectrum sensing within a short time and offers a reliable detection at high SNRs condition. MME and CAV are robust to noise power uncertainty. Due to the combination of these techniques, the proposed schemes offer much more reliable detection when the uncertainty of noise power occurs. Even though the proposed technique takes the longest time in sensing period among two-stage spectrum sensing techniques, it is worth using this period of time to protect the primary user from harmful interference caused by the secondary user.