Compressed sensing (CS)-based wideband spectrum sensing has been a hot topic because it can cut high signal acquisition costs. However, using CS-based approaches, the spectral recovery requires large computational complexity. This letter proposes a wideband spectrum sensing algorithm based on multirate coprime sampling. It can detect the entire wideband directly from sub-Nyquist samples without spectral recovery, thus it brings a significant reduction of computational complexity. Compared with the excellent spectral recovery algorithm, i.e., orthogonal matching pursuit, our algorithm can maintain good sensing performance with computational complexity being several orders of magnitude lower.

Compressed sensing (CS)-based wideband spectrum sensing approaches have attracted much attention because they release the burden of high signal acquisition costs. However, in CS-based sensing approaches, highly non-linear reconstruction methods are used for spectrum recovery, which require high computational complexity. This letter proposes a two-step compressive wideband sensing algorithm. This algorithm introduces a coarse sensing step to further compress the sub-Nyquist measurements before spectrum recovery in the following compressive fine sensing step, as a result of the significant reduction in computational complexity. Its enabled sufficient condition and computational complexity are analyzed. Even when the sufficient condition is just satisfied, the average reduced ratio of computational complexity can reach 50% compared with directly performing compressive sensing with the excellent algorithm that is used in our fine sensing step.