Blind Spectrum Detector for Cognitive Radio Using Compressed Sensing

Based on the sparse property of the cyclic autocorrelation in the cyclic frequencies domain, this paper proposes a new blind spectrum sensing method which uses the compressed sensing technique in order to detect free bands in the radio spectrum. This new sensing method that presents a relative low complexity has the particularity to perform blind and robust detection with only few samples (short observation time) and without any knowledge about the cyclic frequency of the signal, in contrary to cyclostationary detection methods that are not robust when the sample size is small and might need some information about the signal in order to detect. ROC curves obtained by simulation show the superiority of the new proposed technique over cyclostationary detection under the same conditions, particularly the same observation time.