Spectrum sensing techniques A comparison between energy detector and cyclostationarity detector

Spectrum Sensing is the most challenging and enabling technology for Cognitive Radio (CR). The future of wireless / radio communication will be driven by CRs through efficient use of unutilized or underutilized spectrum (White Space). However, the major challenge in reliable communication over a CR System lies in detecting such White Spaces through robust spectrum sensing techniques. Ever since the concept of CR had been proposed, several detection techniques were explored by researchers. Among these, Energy Detection based spectrum sensing, Cyclostationarity based spectrum sensing, Filter Bank, Matched Filter detection and Wavelet Transform based detection are identified as the candidate detection schemes for spectrum sensing in CR. In this paper, we design a cyclostationarity based spectrum sensing for BPSK, BFSK and GMSK channels for application in CR. We shall also evaluate its performance against the basic ED based sensing through their respective Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC), through simulation in MATLAB.