Blind Spectrum Sensing Approaches for Interweaved Cognitive Radio System: A Tutorial and Short Course

Spectrum sensing is one of the essential tasks to have a cognitive radio system, which will allow an unlicensed user, called secondary user, to utilize the spectrum while the licensed user, called primary user, is not occupying it. The spectrum sensing approaches can be classified as blind and knowledge aided approaches. This tutorial summarizes blind spectrum sensing (BSS) approaches that require no prior knowledge of the licensed user’s signal characteristics, specifically for an interweave cognitive radio network model. The tutorial provides a thorough background, major implementations, and limitations of the BSS approaches, which are energy detector approach, maximum to minimum eigenvalue approach, maximum eigenvalue approach, covariance absolute value approach, and covariance Frobenius norm approach. Moreover, the tutorial compares these approaches based on performance metrics and complexity requirements. Furthermore, for a higher interference protection, the combination of two different spectrum sensing approaches, namely two-stage detection technique is presented and discussed. Besides, the tutorial discusses the challenges and possible future research directions. The fundamental objective of this tutorial is to provide insightful views and design aspects of BSS approach to researchers. For this purpose, the tutorial includes pseudo codes and simulation examples to illustrate more about the practical aspects of the above-mentioned approaches.