DVB Detector for Cognitive Radio

Cognitive radio (CR) is seen as one of the revolutionary techniques for future spectrum utilization. The first and probably the most challenging task for CR is to detect/sense the white space of the spectrum for its usage. In this paper, detection of DVB-T signals is studied since TV band has been considered by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to be pioneered for CR usage. Cyclostationary feature of DVB signals is explored so that the robust single-cycle detector (SCD) can be employed to handle the problem of noise uncertainty, to which the widely used energy detector (ED) is susceptible. Due to complexity concerns for real-time implementation, a blind twin peak (BTP) detector is proposed to approximate the performance of SCD while keep the complexity as low as ED.