Performance analysis of cyclostationary and energy detection spectrum sensing techniques

The current policies of spectrum allocation leads to inefficient use of spectrum, making it scarce but the truth is, spectrum is not scarce but is underutilized. In today´s era dynamic spectrum access is the need of the hour and cognitive radio is a novel technology which improves spectrum utilization. In this paper overview of cognitive radio along with spectrum sensing techniques is taken into account. Energy detection based spectrum sensing techniques and cyclostationary detection based spectrum sensing techniques are discussed in detail with their block diagrams and flow charts. The paper also describes the performance analysis of energy detector over various fading environments viz. AWGN, Rayleigh, Rican and MIMO. The energy and cyclostationary detectors are implemented in matlab and their simulation results are presented using graphical analysis with the help of ROC (receiver operating characteristics) curves.