Spectrum sensing of orthogonal space-time block coded signals with multiple receive antennas

We consider detection of signals encoded with orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC), using multiple receive antennas. Such signals contain redundancy and they have a specific structure, that can be exploited for detection. We derive the optimal detector, in the Neyman-Pearson sense, when all parameters are known. We also consider unknown noise variance, signal variance and channel coefficients. We propose a number of GLRT based detectors for the different cases, that exploit the redundancy structure of the OSTBC signal. We also propose an eigenvalue-based detector for the case when all parameters are unknown. The proposed detectors are compared to the energy detector. We show that when only the noise variance is known, there is no gain in exploiting the structure of the OSTBC. However, when the noise variance is unknown there can be a significant gain.