Selection of spectrum sensing techniques for cognitive radio: Hypothesis based

Tremendous development in wireless communication scenario has led to an advancement in the revolutionary technology named `cognitive radio´. It aims to enhance the spectrum efficiency by employing dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and providing opportunistic access to the electromagnetic licensed spectrum and relies on `spectrum sensing techniques´. A system is required which can select spectrum sensing method from a set of different methods according to its merits and requirements. This paper proposes a hypothesis based selection of spectrum sensing techniques where threshold has been selected as the hypothesis which selects the technique to be used in the present conditions. Two popular spectrum sensing methods namely energy detection and cyclostationary feature detection are compared with each other and also with the proposed method using some standard performance metrics. The proposed method improves the detection probabilities and lowers the rates of false alarms and mis-detections thus tends to improve the quality of transmission.