IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 58, NO.

2, FEBRUARY 2010

709

Spectrum Sensing in Wideband

OFDM Cognitive Radios
Chien-Hwa Hwang, Member, IEEE, Guan-Long Lai, and Shih-Chang Chen

AbstractIn this paper, spectrum sensing of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based cognitive radio (CR)
is addressed. The goal is to identify the portions of the spectrum
that are unused by primary user systems and other CR systems,
called existing user (EU) systems altogether, with the emphasis on
conquering the challenge imposed by multipath fading channel.
The sensing of EU systems consists of two steps. In the first step,
the maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of the frequency bands
of EU systems are calculated; in the second step, detection is performed at each suspected band to decide whether an EU system is
truly in operation. The idea is that an EU system appears at a segment of continuous subcarriers. This fact can be exploited by employing measurements at a continual subcarriers and executing the
sensing along the frequency domain. An autoregressive (AR) model
is adopted to track the variation of the received EU signal strength
along frequencies. It is shown by simulations that the proposed
spectrum sensing algorithm is robust in a severe frequency-selective fading channel.
Index TermsAutoregressive model, cognitive radio (CR), dynamic programming, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM), spectrum sensing.

I. INTRODUCTION

ADIO spectrum is the medium for all types of wireless

communications, such as cellular phones, satellite-based
services, wireless low-powered consumer devices, and so on.
Since most of the usable spectrum has been allocated to existing
services, the radio spectrum has become a precious and scarce
resource, and there is an urgent concern about the availability of
spectrum for future needs. The solution to the spectrum scarcity
problem is dynamically looking for the spectrum white spaces
and using them opportunistically. Cognitive radio (CR) technology, defined first by Mitola [1], [2], is thus advocated as a
candidate for implementing opportunistic spectrum sharing.

Manuscript received December 22, 2008; accepted August 19, 2009. First
published September 18, 2009; current version published January 13, 2010. The
associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for
publication was Prof. Hongbin Li. This research was supported in part by the
National Science Council, Taiwan, under Contract NSC-95-2219-E-007-005,
and in part by Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under
Contract BU95W028.
C.-H. Hwang and are with the Institute of Communications Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan (e-mail: chhwang@ee.
nthu.edu.tw).
G.-L. Lai was with the Institute of Communications Engineering, National
Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan (e-mail: tim910282@hotmail.
com).
S.-C. Chen is with the Realtek Semiconductor Corporation, Hsinchu 300,
Taiwan (e-mail: iamcsc@realtek.com.tw).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSP.2009.2032453

To achieve the goal of CR, it is a fundamental requirement

that the cognitive user performs spectrum sensing to identify
the portions of spectrum that are unused at a specific time. Thus,
over various frequency bands, sensing of primary user systems
and other CR systems in operation should be performed regularly. Each of the systems that have already been operating
in a particular band of interest is called an existing user (EU)
system. Digital signal processing techniques can be employed
to promote the sensitivity of the EU signal sensing. Three commonly adopted methods are matched filtering, energy detection
[3][9], and signal feature detection with the cyclostationary
feature most widely adopted [10][13]. Moreover, cooperation
among cognitive users in spectrum sensing can not only reduce
the detection time and thus increase the agility, but also alleviate the problem that a cognitive user fails to detect EU signal
because it is located at a weak-signal region [7][9], [14][18].
For an overview of these approaches and their properties, see
[19][21].
It is concluded in [22] that orthogonal-frequency-division
multiplexing (OFDM) is the best physical layer candidate for
a CR system since it allows easy generation of spectral signal
waveforms that can fit into discontinuous and arbitrary-sized
spectrum segments. Besides, OFDM is optimal from the viewpoint of capacity as it allows achieving the Shannon channel
capacity in a fragmented spectrum. Owing to these reasons, in
this paper, we consider the problem of spectrum sensing in an
OFDM based CR system.
The main concern of this paper is to develop spectrum sensing
algorithms that are robust to multipath fading channels. One
of the main challenges in performing reliable spectrum sensing
arises from the fading channel of a wireless link. There are two
types of fading, i.e., shadowing fading and multipath fading.
The former does not cause large fluctuations in signal strength
over small changes of receivers location, while the latter generally results in significant variations of signal strength with a
small change of location [23]. To alleviate the difficulties resulting from fading channels, it is advantageous to make use of
diversity gains in various domains. Concerned with shadowing
fading, cooperative spectrum sensing among cognitive users situated at different locations can be employed, which is the user
cooperation diversity. Regarding multipath fading (the concern
of this work), since channels may be quite different even for two
closely located receivers, a spectrum sensing device equipped
with multiple antennas is able to exploit the spatial diversity.
Moreover, particularly convenient for OFDM based CR, spectrum sensing using observations along the frequency domain
can take advantage of the fact that, once an EU system appears,
several subcarriers in a row are interfered simultaneously. Thus,

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spectrum sensing can be transformed into the model change detection [24], which aims at detecting changes in the characteristics of physical systems and is an important practical problem.
However, due to frequency selectivity of multipath fading, the
received EU signal strength may vary with frequencies. Part of
the band of the EU system may be deeply faded, making it difficult to detect its presence. A remedy is to endow the spectrum sensing device with the capability of tracking EU signal
strength variation in the frequency domain. In so doing, even
though some portion of the band is severely faded, weak signals
at this region can still be identified as a part of the entire signal.
In this paper, it is assumed that an unknown number of EU
systems are operating in the spectrum segment under sensing.
The detection of EU systems is composed of two stages: i) estimating the most likely bands of EU systems, and ii) for each
suspected band, testing whether or not an EU system is really
in operation. For the first stage, an autoregressive (AR) model
is adopted to track the changes of signal magnitude in the frequency domain, and the maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of
the parameters of concern are calculated. It turns out that a huge
number of search is required for estimating the frequency bands
of EU systems. A dynamic programming (DP) technique is employed to reduce the complexity in searching. For the second
stage, due to insufficient knowledge of statistics of EU signals,
an energy detector is employed. In each of stages i) and ii), both
single antenna and multiple antennas are considered.
The organization of this paper is summarized as follows. In
Section II, the problem statement as well as the signal model of
a CR OFDM system interfered by an EU signal are described.
Two stages of spectrum sensing, i.e., estimation and detection,
are given in Section III when the sensing device has a single
antenna. In Section IV, results of Section III are extended to the
case that multiple antennas are equipped. Simulation results of
the proposed algorithm are demonstrated in Section V. Finally,
we conclude this paper in Section VI.

and
are the complex-valued contriwhere
butions resulting from EU signal and additive white Gaussian
noise (AWGN), respectively.
Suppose there are EU systems operating in the frequency
occupying
band of interest, with the th system
th to the
th subcarriers of
the band extending from the
the CR OFDM system. It is assumed that the frequency bands
with
, are disjoint
of EU systems, i.e.,
and the knowledge of the number of EU systems and their frequency bands are unknown to the sensing device. The sensing
algorithm addressed in this paper decides how many EU systems and where they are based on the observation
with denoting the observation
length at each subcarrier.
III. SENSING OF EU SYSTEMS IN A COGNITIVE OFDM SYSTEM
is processed in two steps. We
The observation
and
first perform estimation for the most likely values of
, and we next execute a detection for each suspected
band to decide whether or not an EU system is truly in operation. The estimation and detection procedures are to be
discussed in Sections III-A and B, respectively.
A. Estimating Frequency Bands of EU Systems
For each

, we build an observation
from
such that the estimation of the frequency bands of
EU signals is based on the measurements along the frequency
in the
domain. Assume it is known that the variances of
. We choose
real and imaginary parts are both

(2)
II. PROBLEM STATEMENT
Consider a wideband cognitive OFDM system with subcarriers. It is required that the CR system identifies the portions
of the spectrum that are unused at a specific time. Thus, over
various frequency bands, sensing of primary user systems and
other CR systems in operation is performed regularly. Each of
the systems that have already been functioning within a band
of interest is called an EU system. The CR system performing
sensing is wideband in the sense that its bandwidth can accommodate more than one EU systems.
When a sensing of EU systems is performed, the CR OFDM
system ceases transmission. The received signal is amplified and
frequency down-converted from the radio frequency (RF) under
sensing to the baseband. After analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion, cyclic prefix removal and some necessary processing, the
output signal is passed through a -point discrete Fourier transform (DFT). If an EU signal is present at the frequency of subcarrier , the th DFT output corresponding to the th OFDM
symbol is given by
(1)
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with
. It is seen
is the periodogram of the received signal at the th subcarrier
OFDM symbols, and the periodogram is an
averaged over
estimate of the true spectrum of a signal. The observation for EU
system frequency bands estimation is
, where we define
.
We first consider the case that there is one EU system, i.e.,
, operating in the target band, and then we extend the
result to the more practical situation that there are unknown
number of EU systems in the band.
.
Suppose that an EU system is present at subcarriers
with neighWe assume that correlation exists among
boring subcarrier indices. A first-order autoregressive (AR)
model is adopted to fit the signal
.
That is,
(3)
where and are model parameters, and
is a white
Gaussian random process with variance . All of , , and
are unknown. If there is no EU signal in subcarriers
,

HWANG et al.: SPECTRUM SENSING IN WIDEBAND OFDM COGNITIVE RADIOS

the model in (3) is revised by letting the model parameters

, i.e.,
(4)

711

, the first term at the right-hand side

Since we have set
and
are
of (10) is a constant, and the ML estimates of
obtained by solving
(11)

where
is a white Gaussian process with unknown variance .
Since we have assumed
, for notational simplicity,
and
to denote the starting and ending subcarrier
we use
indexes of the EU system. According to models (3) and (4), we
can perform ML estimation for and . Given the observation
, the likelihood function parameterized by unknowns ,
, , , and is [see (5), shown at the bottom of the page].
is not considered in
Note that, in the third line of (5),
the sum
because the EU signal is present in
but absent in
. The ML estimates of unknowns , ,
and
are given by

whose solution can be found efficiently by the technique of DP

[25], [26] as follows. To resort to DP, some modifications to the
derivation presented above are required. We can decompose the
second line of (5), i.e., the band without EU signal, into two
and
,
terms corresponding to segments
of
in (4) is estimated individually
and the variance
at the two segments. By doing so, the optimization in (11) can
be rewritten as

(6)
(7)
(8)
where

, and
(12)

..
.

..
.

(9)

By plugging the above estimates into the likelihood function (5),

its logarithm is given as

where
,
, and
and
have their expressions given in (7) but here they are affixed with
subscripts to denote the interval in which the estimates are per, we define equations (13)(14),
formed. For
shown at the bottom of the page, and we let

(10)

(15)

(5)

(13)

(14)

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The optimization in (12) is equivalent to

(16)

,
, and
are ML estiwhere
in (21) is due
mates obtained in (7). Note that
to the first term at the right-hand side of (10).
In the following, we first discuss the estimation of
for a given , and we then consider how the value of
can
be specified. Let the sum of the first two terms in (21) be repre. For a fixed value of
sented by
, we can estimate
by solving

(17)
(18)
To solve (18), for each
, we compute
in (15)
. This argument is
and the associated argument yielding
. Then, by (18), we obtain
denoted as

and
are defined in (13) and (14), respecwhere
, the optimization can be
tively. Similarly to the case of
and
,
solved by the DP technique. With
as the minimal accumulated modwe define
eling errors in segments

due to the inner minimization of (17), we have

Note that the optimizations of (15) and hence of (18) are concerned with solving
in
sequentially. Since
is the least square (LS) estimate, they can be obtained by the formulas of sequential LS estimates, e.g., [27, pp.
242251].
Now, we consider the situation that there may be more than
one EU systems operating in the band of interest. Assume there
are EU systems with the th system operating at subcarriers
, and all of
are disjoint. With
can be divided into
this setting, subcarriers
segments, where each of

(19)
contains samples of white noises, and every segment
(20)
contains an EU signal. Models of (4) and (3) are used to represent the signals in segments of (19) and (20), respectively. That
is, AR models and AWGN are adopted interlacedly to fit the ob. All of and
are
servation
unknown and need to be estimated. The target function for estimation is given by

(21)
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(22)

assuming

EU

systems

are

operating at subcarriers
, and all other segments
(
) is defined
contain only AWGN. Similarly,
as the minimal accumulated modeling errors in segments

where segments of
have EU signals,
and all others contain only AWGN. Specifically, we have

HWANG et al.: SPECTRUM SENSING IN WIDEBAND OFDM COGNITIVE RADIOS

713

Fig. 1. DP algorithm for solving (22).

, it can be
are

and so on. With the initial condition

shown that
and
related recursively by

(23)
(24)
that yields
For each in (23), the value of argument
is denoted by
. Similarly, for each in (24), the value of
argument
that yields
is denoted by
. The procedure to computing the solution of (22) is stated in Fig. 1. The
can be determined backestimates
ward by
,
,
, and so on. To summarize, we have

The benefit of DP is obvious. If we were to enumerate all possible combinations of

, it would be about
for
EU systems. However, from the algorithm in Fig. 1, it is seen
the complexity of DP increases linearly with .
Regarding the estimate of , it is conventionally carried out
by incorporating a penalty term into (21) using criteria such as
Akaike information criterion (AIC) [28], minimum description
length (MDL) [29], Bayesian information criterion (BIC) [30],
and so on, and searching for the minimum with respect to .
However, the specification of the penalty term requires the explicit model of the modeling error, which is generally unavailable when an EU system is present; moreover, the criteria are
usually based on asymptotic approximations.1 Since the accuracy of the estimate of is crucial in the performance of spectrum sensing, we do not tackle the problem of estimating directly. Instead, we make a detour by specifying an upper bound
for ; by means of some extra processing (to be described in
Section III-B), it is still possible to find the estimates of EU
bands.

1A precise estimate of
is difficult even for a very simple signal model. For
example, simulation results for estimation of number of change points based on
BIC are given in [31], in which the th segment is distributed as ( 1 I) with
1 an all-one vector and a constant having = for = . We have tried
several criteria to estimate . However, simulation results showed that these
criteria do not lead to an accurate estimate of .

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6 
m

N ;

i6 j

Suppose that the number of EU systems existing in the band

. When
is upper-bounded by . We solve (22) with
and a deep fade
the true number of EU systems is less than
occurs, two situations may happen in the solution of (22). First,
when the deep fade takes place at the middle region of the band,
the EU system may be judged as two, and the portion of the
band under deep fade is not found. Secondly, if the fade is at
the border, only part of the band is sensed, and a piece of band
containing only AWGN is falsely alarmed as the band of an
EU system. Fig. 2 depicts the above two circumstances when
but
is set as 2. Note
only one EU system is present at
that, with the fading in Fig. 2(b), it is highly probable that the
second detected band starts at subcarrier
. This is explained
as follows. The signal strength at the left side of the EU band
is strong, so it is natural that an AR model is chosen to fit it.
is modeled by an AR. Due to the pattern
Suppose that
,
of models of AWGN-AR-AWGN-AR-AWGN when
the band
should be modeled either by AWGN
is modeled by AWGN-AR-AWGN) or
(in this case,
by AWGN-AR-AWGN. However, it is unlikely that the former
results in an inaccurate
happens because the signal at
estimate of noise variance and hence a large value of
. Thus, the right side of the EU band is modeled by
is by AR-AWGN. The reason that
AWGN, and
is
the second detected band starts exactly at subcarrier
because it is the true transition point of the band of EU system
and the band of AWGN.
B. Detecting EU Signals
The unfound bands due to deep channel fade can still be
hopefully recovered and detected if detection is performed at
bands ( estimated bands plus
reeach of
maining bands), and the final result of spectrum sensing is the
union of the bands that are judged to have EU systems in op, and the
bands
eration.2 For example, when
. Suppose that the detections perare labeled as
formed at , , and
return positive result. Then, the two
, with
(
and
are adjabands
cent) and
, are the final result of spectrum sensing.
Let us call the task performed in solving (22) as the estimation stage and the detection mentioned above as the detection
stage. We will demonstrate later by simulations that, at a moderate signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), the detection stage is able to
compensate for the errors made at the estimation stage. That is,
in Fig. 2(a) can be detected, and the falsely
the band

2For the
+ 1 remaining bands, we can also set some rules to exclude those
very unlikely to be EU bands. As our objective is to re-include the bands that are
unfound due to deep fade, the rule of exclusion may be based on the bandwidth.

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Fig. 2. An EU system operates at subcarriers [a; b], and M is set as 2. The received EU signal strength is plotted as the shaded region. (a) A deep fade occurs at
the middle region of the band, and the result of band estimation is [a; c] and [d; b], and (b) deep fade occurs at the border, and the estimated bands are [a; c] and
[b + 1; d].

in Fig. 2(b) can be correctly identified

alarmed band
as a band of AWGN.
The goal is to test whether an EU system is truly present in
each of the suspected bands found in the estimation stage. For
notational simplicity, we address the detection of EU signal in
. Commonly adopted detection algorithms in CR contain
matched filtering, energy detection, and cyclostationary signal
feature detection [19]. However, due to the lack of knowledge
about EU signals, energy detection becomes the only choice
among the three. Actually, this is a very natural selection as the
receiver structure of an OFDM based CR is convenient for the
implementation of an energy detector.
The detector is designated as

where
represents EU signal is absent, and
otherwise.
Under
, the scaled test statistic
is a central chi,
squared distribution with degree of freedom
i.e.,
. Using the NeymanPearson philosophy, the
detection threshold is set as
(25)
with the target false alarm probability
, where
is
the inverse function of the right-tail probability evaluated at
for distribution .
Suppose that an EU system is present, and its average power
at the th subcarrier is denoted by , given as

The test statistic

can be expressed as

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where by the central limit theorem, the distributions of the

second and third terms at the right-hand side can be approxand
imated as
, respectively. Thus, given a threshold
, the probability of detection is

(26)

where
is the right-tail probability of
evaluated at
. To relate the probability of miss
and the probability
as
of false alarm, we approximate the test statistic under
Gaussian, and the threshold in (25) has

(27)
Plugging (27) back to (26) and by some manipulations, we obtain

where
SNR of the EU signal in the band.

(28)
is the average

IV. MULTIPLE ANTENNAS

To improve the performance of spectrum sensing, we may
equip the sensing device with
(
) receive antennas.
We suppose that, under
, each antenna observes the same
EU transmission, and the channels from an EU to all antennas
are independent. The output of each antenna is processed
individually by a DFT. In the presence of an EU signal, let
stand for the th symbol DFT
output of the th receive antenna at subcarrier , where
and
are contributions from EU signal and AWGN,
respectively. In the following, the superscript
is affixed to
a notation of single-antenna to represent the counterpart of the
notation in the th antenna for the multiantenna case. If no
ambiguity occurs, new notations augmented with superscript
will not be defined again.

HWANG et al.: SPECTRUM SENSING IN WIDEBAND OFDM COGNITIVE RADIOS

715

In the estimation stage, the observation from the th antenna

is

Consider that there is one EU system operating in the

band. Let the likelihood function at the th antenna be
. We assume the noise
and
are common at all antennas, and
variances
and
are distinct for different s. Since the received signals at antennas are mutually independent, the joint likelihood
is given by

(29)
We estimate the unknowns
individually at each anand
are estimated from the combined obsertenna, and
vations of all antennas. By following the same steps in the case
of single antenna, it can be shown the optimization presented in
(16)(18) still applies except that
and
should
be revised as

Fig. 3. Performance of an energy detector with the processing gain

.

D = KN (q 0 q + 1)
under

and as

(30)
and [see (31), shown at the bottom of the page], respectively. On
the other hand, in the case that there may be arbitrary number
of EU systems in the band, the algorithm of Fig. 1 still holds
except that
and
in (23) and (24) are replaced with
(30) and (31), respectively, and the initial condition of
is
.
revised to be
In the detection stage, to perform detection at the band
, the test statistic is

where is somewhat different in the form from its counterpart

in single antenna to take into account the distinct noise variances
at antennas. With a target false alarm rate
, the
threshold is given as

under
. It can be shown the rates of miss and false alarm are
related by

(32)
where

Compare (28) and (32), we can see the effective observation

times that of the single antenna case; thus, the
length is
adoption of multiple antennas decreases the probability of miss
which often results from deep channel fade. The performance
of energy detection is plotted in Fig. 3 with processing gain
.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS

By the central limit theorem, the test statistic

is distributed as

Throughout the simulations, an OFDM CR with the number

of subcarriers
is adopted, and the observation length
. The fading channels used in simulations are
is set as

(31)

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Fig. 4. Performance of the estimation stage with respect to the average SNR
of EU signal, frequency selectivity of fading channels, and the number of EU
. The value of
is correctly
systems. The length of observation is
chosen, and the estimator has single antenna.

N = 100

Fig. 5. Performance of the estimation stage with respect to the average SNR of
EU signal, the number of antennas, and the number of EU systems. The length
of observation is
. The value of is correctly chosen, and the number
of channel paths is equal to 16.

N = 100

multipath Rayleigh with uniform power delay profiles. Each of

the figures and tables is generated by Monte Carlo simulations
with 1000 runs. The channels change from one Monte Carlo run
to another. When multiple antennas are used, channels from an
EU to different antennas are independent. Thus, diversity gain
is obtained by the combining across antennas. We first show
the performance at the estimation stage in Figs. 4 and 5 and
Table I and then the overall performance of spectrum sensing,
i.e., composite of estimation and detection, in Tables II and III.
Before presenting the performance of the estimation stage, we
give the definition of a hit. We use and to denote the true
number of EU systems and the chosen number in running (22),
respectively. As
is the upper bound of , we always have
. Given the true EU bands
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and the estimates of EU bands

. A hit
is equal to some estimated
happens if each EU band
EU band
with one-subcarrier estimation error toler, one can find
ance at both sides. That is, for each
such that
and
.
some
In Figs. 4 and 5, we depict the performance of the estimation
stage when the value of (number of EU systems operating in
the band) is correctly chosen in running (22). Fig. 4 compares
the performance of the EU band estimator for fading channels
with different frequency selectivity when the number of antenna
. The numbers of multipaths in comparison are 4 and 16,
1, 2, and 3. EU
and we consider number of EU systems
,
systems #1, #2, and #3 appear at subcarriers
and
, respectively. They all have bandwidths equal to 15.
, #1 EU system is in the band; when
, sysWhen
tems #1 and #2 exist, and so on. Every EU system has the same
average power. The horizontal axis of Fig. 4 is the ratio of the
average power of an EU signal to AWGN; the vertical axis is the
probability of hit. It is seen that the performance of estimation
degrades as the number of EU systems increases, and the frequency selectivity of the channel deteriorates the performance
as well. Fig. 5 compares the performance of the EU band estiand number of
mator for the number of antennas
EU systems
. The number of multipaths is equal
to 16. The frequency bands of EU systems are the same as those
set in Fig. 4. It is shown that the performance of estimation improves with the increase of .
Below, we investigate the performance at the estimation stage
when the value of in (22) is incorrectly specified, i.e.,
. Table I shows the performance of the estimation stage when
and
. The EU system is located
at subcarriers
, and the number of multipaths is equal to
, the estimator returns the result
16. Since
and
. For each , there contain four columns. The
, we have
first column denotes hit. Note that, since
one falsely alarmed band when a hit occurs. However, simulation results indicate that the bandwidth of a falsely alarmed
band is generally small (two or three subcarriers). The second
(miss of type-I) and third (miss of type-II) columns denote the
probabilities that the situations illustrated in Fig. 2(a) and (b),
respectively, happen. The fourth column is the sum of the values
of the first three columns. It is seen that the sums are in general
close to 1, meaning that hit and miss of types I and II encompass
most situations. We observe that, as the average SNR of the EU
signal increases, the probability of hit decreases; regarding the
probability of miss, type-I increases with the average SNR, and
type-II tends to increase as well but not so obvious as type-I.
This is explained as follows. When a deep channel fade occurs,
the increase of average SNR magnifies the channel frequency
selectivity; the portion of the band not experiencing deep fade
tends to be fitted by an AR model, and the portion under deep
fade is modeled by AWGN. The EU system band is thus torn
into pictures of Fig. 2(a) and (b), and the probability of hit is
decreased with the increase of SNR. We also find that the tendencies of increase/decrease of probabilities of hit and miss become more and more evident when the number of antennas is
to
. This is because, with the increase
raised from
of the number of antennas, it is easier to identity the band of EU

HWANG et al.: SPECTRUM SENSING IN WIDEBAND OFDM COGNITIVE RADIOS

717

TABLE I
PERFORMANCE AT THE ESTIMATION STAGE WHEN ONE EU SYSTEM IS PRESENT AT SUBCARRIERS [35; 49] (m = 1) BUT M = 2. THE NUMBER OF MULTIPATHS
IS EQUAL TO 16, AND THE OBSERVATION LENGTH IS N = 100. THE DATA ARE GENERATED BY THE MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION WITH 1000 RUNS

TABLE II
PROBABILITY OF DETECTION OF SPECTRUM SENSING FOR (m; M ) 2 f(1; 1); (2; 2); (3; 3)g AND K 2 f1; 2; 3g. THE NUMBER OF MULTIPATHS IS EQUAL TO 16,
AND THE OBSERVATION LENGTH IS N = 100. THE RESULTS ARE GENERATED BY THE MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION WITH 1000 RUNS

TABLE III
PROBABILITY OF DETECTION OF SPECTRUM SENSING FOR (m; M ) 2 f(1; 2); (1; 2); (2; 3)g AND K 2 f1; 2; 3g. THE NUMBER OF MULTIPATHS IS EQUAL TO 16,
AND THE OBSERVATION LENGTH IS N = 100. THE RESULTS ARE GENERATED BY THE MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION WITH 1000 RUNS

system, or equivalently, the band without EU system. However,

, the band of EU is to be
due to the incorrect value of
detected as two, leading to type-I miss.
In the following, the overall performance of spectrum
sensing, i.e., concatenation of estimation and detection stages,
is demonstrated. Let
denote the
final result of spectrum sensing. We have described in the first
paragraph of Section III-B how the set
is obtained. Detection occurs if each EU band
is covered
by some
with one-subcarrier tolerance at both ends.
That is, we say the EU bands are detected if, for each EU band
,
, one can find some
such that
. Note that the definitions of
hit and detection are somewhat different. In the former, it is
required that the estimated band is equal to the true band (with
one-subcarrier tolerance); while in the latter, we require only
the estimated band to be a subset of a true band. Thus, in case
of detection, there may be some falselyalarmed subcarriers.
However, simulation results indicate that the number of such
falselyalarmed subcarriers is generally small.
Table II gives the performance when
with
,
and
and
. When
, the
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; when
, EU systems are
EU system is located at
and
; when
, a system at
is
at
added. The number of channel paths used in simulations is 16.
For each pair of
, each column shows the detection probability of EU system(s) at a specific value of . We observe that,
for each
, the probability of detection is proportional to
the number of antennas and the average SNR, and the detection probability is inversely proportional to the number of EU
systems. Table III shows the performance of the proposed specwith
,
trum sensing algorithm when
and
, and
. The environments of simulations are the same as those of Table II. Compare the results
at
and
with that of
in
Table II, it is observed that the detection probability gets worse
with the increase of discrepancy between
and . The same
inference is reached when comparing the result of
in this table and the result of
in Table II.
Moreover, the second column of Table III gives the overall detection performance for
, while Table I shows
the probabilities of hit and misses of types I and II at the esti. Compare Table I and the
mation stage with the same
second column of Table III, we can see the probability of de-

718

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 58, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2010

tection shown in the latter is generally higher than the column

Sum in the former with the same . This is mainly because
some unfound EU bands at the estimation stage belong to neither type I nor type II misses, but they are recovered at the detection stage.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the problem of EU signal sensing in an OFDM
based CR system is addressed, where the number of EU systems in operation and their frequency bands are all unknown.
Our main idea is that, once an EU system appears, several subcarriers in a row are interfered. To exploit this fact, observations
along the frequency domain are employed. The emphasis of this
work is on combating the challenge resulting from a severe frequency selective fading channel. We use an AR model to track
the variation of the received EU signal strength along the frequency axis. When a deep fade occurs at part of the band of an
EU system, tracking enables the sensing device to identify the
weak signal under deep fade as a part of the entire signal. We
also investigate the scenario of multiple antennas to enhance the
performance of spectrum sensing.
The task of spectrum sensing is composed of two stages: estimation and detection. In the estimation stage, due to the lack
of precise knowledge of EU signals statistics, it is hard to obtain an accurate estimate for the number of EU systems in operation. We assume the knowledge of an upper bound of the
number of EU systems, denoted by , is known, and we calculate the ML estimates of the bands of
EU systems. In the detection stage, energy detection is performed individually at each
of
bands, including
estimated bands and
reremaining
maining bands. Detection is executed at the
bands because some of them are unfound bands due to deep
channel fade. The final result of spectrum sensing is the union of
the bands that are judged to be EU system present by energy
detection. Simulations result demonstrate that the composite of
the estimation and detection is robust under the ill condition that
the correct number of EU systems cannot be found.
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719

Chien-Hwa Hwang (M00) received the B.S. and

M.S. degrees from the National Taiwan University,
Taiwan, in 1993 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D.
degree from the University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, in 2003, all in electrical engineering.
In August 2003, he joined the Institute of Communications Engineering of the National Tsing Hua
University, Taiwan, as an Assistant Professor. His
research interests include random matrix theory and
statistical signal processing.

Shih-Chang Chen received the B.S. degree from the

Department of Electrical Engineering and the M.S.
degree from the Institute of Communications Engineering, both in the National Tsing Hua University,
Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2005 and 2007, respectively.
He is currently an Engineer at the Digital IC Design Department of Realtek Semiconductor Corporation, Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Guan-Long Lai received the B.S. degree from the

Department of Electrical Engineering at the National
Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan, in 2007
and the M.S. degree from the Institute of Communications Engineering, National Tsing Hua University,
Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2009.

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