Spectral Correlation-Based Multi-Antenna Spectrum Sensing Technique

To meet the challenges in sensing the spectrum in a reliable and timely manner, an approach of multi-antenna spectrum sensing based on spectral correlation property is proposed in this paper. Without any prior information of the licensed system, it extracts the frequency-domain channel information from the spectral correlation functions (SCF) of multiple antenna signals, and then generates the SCF of multi-antenna combining (SCF-MAC) over the frequency-cycle frequency plane. The expressions for the detection and false alarm probabilities of a decision based on SCF-MAC are derived for frequency selective channel, which indicate the proposed approach is capable of achieving full spatial diversity in spectrum sensing. Simulation results corroborate the theoretical analysis and show the significant performance improvement.