Compressive energy detection for blind coarse wideband sensing: Comparative performance study

Wideband signal acquisition and spectrum sensing play a crucial role in a number of applications. In this work we discuss the task of blind spectrum sensing of frequency-sparse wideband signals sampled at sub-Nyquist rates. We show how in a generic sub-Nyquist sampling framework the results of the support recovery can be directly used for coarse multichannel energy detection. We numerically study the performance of the proposed compressive energy detector and compare it with that of the related approaches. Our results demonstrate that it outperforms its closest counterpart that operates on the recovered power spectral density and provides a comparable performance to the Nyquist-rate energy detector in the high SNRs.