Multiband spectrum sensing for cognitive radios based on distributed compressed measurements

A wideband spectrum sensing method for cognitive radios is presented which is based on compressed measurements. The proposed detector does not require signal reconstruction from the compressed measurements. A fusion centre collects the measurements from different sensing nodes and then makes a sensing decision based on a simplified maximum likelihood criterion which does not require prior signal information. This results in an efficient and low complexity spectrum detector especially for dynamic spectrum occupancy scenarios. The performance of the proposed detector is exhibited by means of numerical simulations for probability of erroneous detection and receiver operating characteristic curves.