Fast blind spectrum sensing method based on determinant of covariance matrix

Spectrum sensing is the key problem for cognitive radio systems. A fast blind sensing method based on Determinant of Covariance Matrix (DCM) of the received signals is proposed to sense the available spectrum for the cognitive users with the help of the multiple antennas at the receiver of the cognitive users. The greatest advantage of the new method is that it requires no information of the noise power and without any eigen-decomposition (or SVD) of sample covariance matrix. Both the simulation and the analytical results demonstrate that the proposed method is effectiveness and robustness.