This paper provides theoretical analyses for maximum cyclic autocorrelation selection (MCAS)-based spectrum sensing techniques in cognitive radio networks. The MCAS-based spectrum sensing techniques are low computational complexity spectrum sensing in comparison with some cyclostationary detection. However, MCAS-based spectrum sensing characteristics have never been theoretically derived. In this study, we derive closed form solutions for signal detection probability and false alarm probability for MCAS-based spectrum sensing. The theoretical values are compared with numerical examples, and the values match well with each other.

As one functionality of the wireless distributed network (WDN) enabling flexible wireless networks, it is supposed that a dynamic spectrum access is applied to OFDM systems for superior radio resource management. As a basic technology for such WDN, our study deals with the OFDM signal detection based on its cyclostationary feature. Previous relevant studies mainly relied on software simulations based on the Monte Carlo method. This paper analytically clarifies the relationship between the design parameters of the detector and its detection performance. The detection performance is formulated by using multiple design parameters including the transfer function of the receive filter. A hardware experiment with radio frequency (RF) signals is also carried out by using the detector consisting of an RF unit and FPGA. Thereby, it is verified that the detection characteristics represented by the false-alarm and non-detection probabilities calculated by the analytical formula agree well with those obtained by the hardware experiment. Our analysis and experiment results are useful for the parameter design of the signal detector to satisfy required performance criteria.

This paper presents a computationally efficient cyclostationarity detection based spectrum sensing technique in cognitive radio. Traditionally, several cyclostationarity detection based spectrum sensing techniques with a low computational complexity have been presented, e.g., peak detector (PD), maximum cyclic autocorrelation selection (MCAS), and so on. PD can be affected by noise uncertainty because it requires a noise floor estimation, whereas MCAS does not require the estimation. Furthermore, the computational complexity of MCAS is greater than that of PD because MCAS must compute some statistics for signal detection instead of the estimation unnecessary whereas PD must compute only one statistic. In the presented MCAS based techniques, only one statistic must be computed. The presented technique obtains other necessary statistics from the procedure that computes the statistic. Therefore, the computational complexity of the presented is almost the same as that of PD, and it does not require the noise floor estimation for threshold. Numerical examples are shown to validate the effectiveness of the presented technique.

Spectrum sensing is an important function for dynamic spectrum access (DSA) type cognitive radio systems to detect opportunities for sharing the spectrum with a primary system. The key requirements for spectrum sensing are stability in controlling the probability of false alarm as well as detection performance of the primary signals. However, false alarms can be triggered by noise uncertainty at the secondary devices or unknown interference signals from other secondary systems in realistic radio environments. This paper proposes a robust spectrum sensing method against such uncertainties; it is a kind of cyclostationary feature detection (CFD) approaches. Our proposed method, referred to as maximum cyclic autocorrelation selection (MCAS), compares the peak and non-peak values of the cyclic autocorrelation function (CAF) to detect primary signals, where the non-peak value is the CAF value calculated at cyclic frequencies between the peaks. In MCAS, the desired probability of false alarm can be obtained by setting the number of the non-peak values. In addition, the multiple peak values are combined in MCAS to obtain noise reduction effect and coherent combining gain. Through computer simulations, we show that MCAS can control the probability of false alarm under the condition of noise uncertainty and interference. Furthermore, our method achieves better performance with much less computational complexity in comparison to conventional CFD methods.

The key issue in cognitive radio is to design a reliable spectrum sensing method that is able to detect the signal in the target channel as well as to recognize its type. In this paper, focusing on classifying different orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals, we propose a two-step detection and identification approach based on the analysis of the cyclic autocorrelation function. The key parameters to separate different OFDM signals are the subcarrier spacing and symbol duration. A symmetric peak detection method is adopted in the first step, while a pulse detection method is used to determine the symbol duration. Simulations validate the proposed method.

The cyclic autocorrelation of common digital modulation is researched, and the relationship between the cyclic autocorrelation and the delay, corresponding to the symbol rate, is deduced, then a searching algorithm for the symbol rate is proposed. Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that this method has less computation complexity and is also quite accurate. The estimation result is almost immune to the stationary noise. It's of practical value to modulation recognition and blind demodulation.

In this letter, we propose new methods for estimating frequency and phase of a complex sinusoid in complex white Gaussian noise. These new estimators use the cyclostationarity of the sinusoid which is a cyclostationary signal type. Only one component corresponding to a lag of zero of cyclic autocorrelations is used to reduce the computational load. The performances of our proposed estimators are compared to those of Kay estimator, Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) and maxim-likelihood estimator (MLE). Simulation results show that our proposed methods can estimate the frequency and phase correctly even in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).