Spectrum sensing with multiple antennas

The primary signal detection is an essential operation for the secondary spectrum usage. In this paper we extend the covariance based detection for multiple-antenna receiver. The proposed method uses the noise power estimation and does not suffer from the noise level uncertainty. We analyze the detection algorithm and compute the distribution of the decision variable not only for the pure noise case but also for the jointly presence of primary signal and noise. By deriving the distribution of the primary signal in noise we are able to use the detection probability as the detector design constraint. Our analysis takes advantage of the high amount of samples available at the detector. The proposed method sets the foundation for the analysis of any detector that involves cross correlation, summing and squaring operations of samples.