Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio

Spectrum sensing is the very task upon which the entire operation of cognitive radio rests. For cognitive radio to fulfill the potential it offers to solve the spectrum underutilization problem and do so in a reliable and computationally feasible manner, we require a spectrum sensor that detects spectrum holes (i.e., underutilized subbands of the radio spectrum), provides high spectral-resolution capability, estimates the average power in each subband of the spectrum, and identifies the unknown directions of interfering signals. Cyclostationarity is another desirable property that could be used for signal detection and classification. The multitaper method (MTM) for nonparametric spectral estimation…