Correlation-Based Spectrum Sensing With Oversampling in Cognitive Radio

In wireless communication, the amplitude and phase of the transmitted signal have certain patterns during one symbol duration, which introduces high correlation among the samples obtained by oversampling at the receiver. In this work, we aim to explore such correlation information for cognitive radios to enhance the performance of spectrum sensing. By jointly considering the signal modulation, multipath fading, and oversampling rate, we derive the distribution of the empirical autocorrelation function for the obtained samples, on which we propose two efficient spectrum-sensing algorithms, and then analyze their performance. Our theoretical results reveal that the proposed algorithms with oversampling perform strictly better than the conventional energy detection scheme, while requiring the same level of prior information. Finally, we show through simulations that the derived statistical characteristics approximate the true statistical distribution of the autocorrelation function well, and the proposed sensing algorithms significantly improve the sensing performance compared to several existing sensing schemes.