MMME and DME: Two new eigenvalue-based detectors for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio

Cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access (DSA) promise to ease the scarcity of radio spectrum, which is growing more acute as the demand for wireless connectivity increases. One of the key ingredients of a reliable and efficient DSA system is spectrum sensing, i.e., the act of checking a spectral resource´s occupancy state before opportunistically accessing it. To this end, the present work proposes two new eigenvalue-based detectors, the Maximum-Minus-Minimum-Eigenvalue (MMME) detector and the Difference-of-Means-of-Eigenvalues (DME) detector, both of which exploit the properties of the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of a received signal, which is contaminated with i.i.d. noise. We explain the intuition behind the new detectors, investigate the choice of the DME detector´s parameter and assess their performance in comparison to other covariance-based detectors.