Cluster-Based Differential Energy Detection for Spectrum Sensing in Multi-Carrier Systems

This paper presents a novel differential energy detection scheme for multi-carrier systems, which can form fast and reliable decision of spectrum availability even in very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environment. For example, the proposed scheme can reach 90% in probability of detection (PD) and 10% in probability of false alarm (PFA) for the SNRs as low as -21 dB, while the observation length is equivalent to 2 multi-carrier symbol duration. The underlying initiative of the proposed scheme is applying order statistics on the clustered differential energy-spectral-density (ESD) in order to exploit the channel frequency diversity inherent in high data-rate communications. Specifically, to enjoy a good frequency diversity, the clustering operation is utilized to group uncorrelated subcarriers, while, the differential operation applied onto each cluster can effectively remove the noise floor and consequently overcome the impact of noise uncertainty while exploiting the frequency diversity. More importantly, the proposed scheme is designed to allow robustness in terms of both, time and frequency offsets. In order to analytically evaluate the proposed scheme, PFA and PD for Rayleigh fading channel are derived. The closed-form expressions show a clear relationship between the sensing performance and the cluster size, which is an indicator of the diversity gain. Moreover, we are able to observe up to 10 dB gain in the performance compared to the state-of-the-art spectrum sensing schemes.