A novel low complexity differential energy detection for sensing OFDM sources in low SNR environment

This paper presents a novel frequency-domain energy detection scheme based on extreme statistics for robust sensing of OFDM sources in the low SNR region. The basic idea is to exploit the frequency diversity gain inherited by frequency selective channels with the aid of extreme statistics of the differential energy spectral density (ESD). Thanks to the differential stage the proposed spectrum sensing is robust to noise uncertainty problem. The low computational complexity requirement of the proposed technique makes it suitable for even machine-to-machine sensing. Analytical performance analysis is performed in terms of two classical metrics, i.e. probability of detection and probability of false alarm. The computer simulations carried out further show that the proposed scheme outperforms energy detection and second order cyclostationarity based approach for up to 10 dB gain in the low SNR range.