Phase-rotated Spectral Correlation Detector Based Sensing for Wideband Spectrum at Low SNRs

Wideband spectrum sensing plays a key role in cognitive radio. Detecting wideband signals accurately and efficiently at low SNR regimes has recently attracted much interest from the research community. In this paper, two novel wideband sensing methods are presented, sequential sensing using phase-rotated spectral correlation detector (PSCD) and binary sensing using PSCD, which take advantage of PSCD's detection performance at low SNRs. They are explained in detail with diagrams and pseudo codes. Detection performance of the proposed methods in terms of detection probability and false alarm probability are evaluated in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) environment. The time complexity of the methods is also analyzed. Simulated results indicate that our methods outperform the energy detector at low SNRs.