Edge Energy Detection using GNU radio and USRP2: An analysis study

The evolution of wireless communication had evoked the demands for more radio spectrum. Hence, radio spectrum becomes a scarce resource for the wireless applications. To overcome this problem, Cognitive Radio (CR) emerged as an intelligent wireless technology that allow SU dynamically access into the opportunity licensed spectrum. Through spectrum sensing, spectrum holes are identified and thus interference to licensed user can be avoided, which is a crucial task in CR. However, conventional spectrum sensing methods such as Energy Detection (ED) is less sensitive to the changes of PU compared to Edge Detection. Hence, Edge Energy Detection (EED) spectrum sensing technique is proposed which combines ED and Edge Detection using hard information rules. The proposed spectrum sensing technique is performed experimentally in GNU Radio and Universal Software Radio Peripheral version 2 (USRP2) platform. The performance of EED is evaluated and compared to conventional ED and Edge Detection. The results showed that EED achieved improved sensing performance than conventional ED and Edge Detection.