This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts

for publication in the IEEE DySPAN 2010 proceedings

Spectrum Sensing using Multiple Antennas for

Spatially and Temporally Correlated Noise
Environments
Kommate Jitvanichphaibool, Ying-Chang Liang, and Yonghong Zeng
Institute for Infocomm Research, A STAR,
1 Fusionopolis Way, Singapore 138632
{kjit,ycliang,yhzeng}@i2r.a-star.edu.sg

Abstract This paper is interested in spectrum sensing using

multiple antennas under spatially and temporally correlated noise
environments. We exploit cyclostationary features of the primary
users signal in terms of cyclic spectral coherence function and
the proposed modified cyclic spectral density function, which
has less computational complexity. Two types of detectors are
proposed: pre-combining and post-combining detectors. For precombining method, a blind maximum ratio combining technique
is considered. All detectors are designed to handle noise uncertainty and also be effective in both white noise and colored
noise scenarios. Numerical results are given to illustrate the
performance of all detectors and verify their efficiency against the
noise correlation effect. With the use of estimated channels, precombining detectors are superior to post-combining detectors,
which do not require channel information. It is also shown that
the modified cyclic spectral density function achieves comparable
performance to the cyclic spectral coherence function.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Due to the scarcity of the spectrum, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved a guideline based on
the cognitive radio concept to enhance the utilization of the
spectrum [13]. In general, secondary users (SUs) in a cognitive radio network are allowed to access spectrums occupied
by primary users (PUs) in a primary network given that 1)
those spectrums are vacant, or 2) interferences created by SUs
to PUs occupied those spectrums are under an acceptable level.
The first scenario has already been considered for the TV white
space usage, while the later has attracted considerable interest
in the literatures. In both cases, spectrum sensing is required in
order to check the presence of PUs. A miss detection can cause
considerable interference to PUs, while a false alarm reduces
the efficiency of spectrum usage. Therefore, highly reliable
spectrum sensing is a crucial task to ensure high throughput
and efficiency of spectrum usage for cognitive radio networks.
In the literatures, there are a few spectrum sensing methods
including matched filtering, energy detection, cyclostationarity
detection, and eigenvalue-based detection; see, e.g., [4, 5].
Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. If all
information about the transmitted signal of the PU is known
a priori, matched filtering is the optimum detector. Since
it requires perfect knowledge of the PU signaling features
such as bandwidth, modulation type, pulse shaping, frame
format, etc., it may not be implementable in practice. For

energy detection, signal parameters of the PU are not required.

Hence, it has the least complexity among the three detectors.
However, energy detection is vulnerable to noise uncertainty.
Inaccurate estimation of the noise power can cause SNR wall
and high false alarm probability [6, 7]. While eigenvalue-based
detection can estimate the signal and noise powers simultaneously, it is sensitive to the colored and correlated noises [8, 9].
Recently, cyclostationarity detection has attracted substantial
interests due to its unique ability to distinguish among wireless systems that possess cyclostationary properties. Systems
with different parameters such as modulation type, symbol
rate, carrier frequency, etc., exhibit cyclostationary features
at different cycle frequencies [10]. Signal detection can be
performed by checking the presence of cyclostationary features
at those cycle frequencies. Since this detection method can
distinguish between the PUs signal and interfering signals, it
could be beneficial in the coexistence scenario.
In this paper, cyclostationarity-based detectors for multiantenna cognitive radio systems are considered. Since multiantenna systems are widely implemented for capacity enhancement [11, 12], efficient spectrum sensing methods for
such systems are of particular interest. The proposed detectors are classified into two categories called pre-combining
and post-combining detectors. For pre-combining detectors,
received signals from all antennas are combined first using a
blind maximum ratio combining, and then a cyclostationary
feature is extracted to perform spectrum sensing. A blind
channel estimation scheme relying on the cyclic statistics is
used to estimate the channel coefficients. For post-combining
detectors, cyclostationary features are obtained from all antennas before being combined and used for signal detection.
Cyclostationarity-based spectrum sensing for multi-antenna
systems has been investigated by using the cyclic spectral
density function as a feature [13, 14]. Unlike previous work,
the cyclic spectral coherence function is employed here due
to its effectiveness in handling the noise uncertainty and
noise correlation. In the literature so far, spectrum sensing
is performed based on the assumption that noise samples are
uncorrelated, which is unrealistic in many practical scenarios.
In this work, we propose spectrum sensing approaches that can
take care of the noise correlation as well as noise uncertainty.

978-1-4244-5188-3/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE DySPAN 2010 proceedings

where f1 = f + 2 , f2 = f 2 , f Ns1Ts , and t is

the observation length. We denote Ts as the sample duration,
Ns as the number of samples in each segment, P as the
overlapping parameter, and Q tf as the resolution
product. We define Xi (t, f ) as shown below.

Also, we propose a novel feature using a modified cyclic

spectral density function. This feature provides less computational complexity and comparable performance compared to
the cyclic spectral coherence function.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section
II, a brief background on cyclostationarity is provided. The
system model for spectrum sensing is presented in Section III.
Pre-combining based cyclostationary detectors are presented in
Section IV, which relies on blind channel estimation in cyclic
domain. Section V presents post-combining based cyclostationary detectors which do not require channel estimation.
Numerical results for all detectors are shown in Section VI.
Finally, conclusions are given in Section VII.
Notation: Bold-face letters are used to denote matrices and
vectors. Let us define the Hermitian and Euclidean norm of
vector x as xH and x, respectively. An identity matrix of
size M is denoted as IM . The expectation of random variable
x is defined as E{x}. We use CN (m,
2 ) to represent the
complex Gaussian distribution with mean m
and variance 2 .

Equation (6) suggests that a good estimate of the cyclic SDF is

achieved by using long observation length and small spectral
resolution. To prevent the cycle leakage phenomenon, we
should select P 4. The quality of the approximation can
also be enhanced by adjusting the value of P at the expense
of more computational complexity.

II. BACKGROUND ON C YCLOSTATIONARITY

III. S YSTEM M ODEL

Generally speaking, a signal x(t) exhibits cyclostationarity

if its statistic properties are periodic in time. For a given
and time lag , let us define [10]
 t

2
 j2t
 
1

x t
e
x t+
dt (1)
Rx ( ) = lim
t t t
2
2
2

In this paper, it is assumed that the SU is equipped with

M 1 antennas to sense the presence of a PU with a single
antenna, and a flat-fading channel is considered. There are two
hypotheses associated with the sensed band. At antenna m, the
received signals can be represented as

which is called the cyclic autocorrelation function (AF) of

x(t). is called a cycle frequency. If there exists at least one
non-zero such that max |Rx ( )| > 0, we say that x(t)
exhibits cyclostationarity. The value of such depends on
the type of modulation, symbol rate, etc. For BPSK signals,
cyclostationary features exist at = Tkb and = 2fc + Tkb ,
where Tb is the symbol duration, fc is the carrier frequency,
and k is an integer. Taking the Fourier transform of the cyclic
AF, the cyclic spectral density function (SDF) is obtained as

Rx ( )ej2f d.
(2)
Sx (f ) =

Normalizing the cyclic SDF with a geometric mean composed

of two cyclic SDFs at = 0 for f = f + 2 and f = f 2 ,
the cyclic spectral coherence function (SCF) is given by

x (f ) = 

Sx (f )
,
Sx (f + 2 )Sx (f 2 )

(3)

where Sx (f ) represents the cyclic SDF at = 0.

In practice, Sx (f ) needs to be estimated using either the
frequency- or time-averaging method [10]. In this paper,
the time-averaging approach is employed. The approximated
cyclic SDF can be obtained based on the following temporally
smoothed cyclic periodogram [10, 15].
P Q1

 

u
u
1 
, f1 Xi t
, f2
fXi t
Sx (t, f )t =
P Q u=0
P f
P f

(4)

Xi (t, f ) =

N
s 1

xi (t nTs )ej2f (tnTs ) .

(5)

n=0

The estimated cyclic SDF is obtained from

Sx (f ) = lim

lim Sx (t, f )t .

f 0 t

H0 : ym (n) = wm (n)
H1 : ym (n) = hm s(n) + wm (n),

(6)

(7)

for n = 1, 2, , N 1, where s(n) denotes the transmitted

signal from the PU, hm is the channel coefficient from the
PU to the mth received antenna of the SU, and wm (n) is the
additive noise. The following assumptions are made:

The signal s(n) is a cyclostationary process: with at least

one non-zero cyclic frequency such that Rx ( ) = 0 for
some .
The noise w(n) is a pure stationary process, thus for any

( ) = 0 for all s and Sw

(f ) = 0 for all
non-zero Rw
f s.
The signal s(n) and noise w(n) are independent from
each other.

The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is defined as

M
2
2
m=1 |hm | E[|s(n)| ]
.
SNR = 
M
2
m=1 E[|wm (n)| ]

(8)

Note here that we do not specify whether noise samples are

white or colored, spatially or temporally correlated, Gaussian
or non-Gaussian. The objective of this paper is to explore
the cyclostationary features of the received samples from
all antennas to justify the presence of PU. Two categories
of schemes are proposed: pre-combining and post-combining
based detectors, which will be presented in the following two
sections.

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE DySPAN 2010 proceedings

IV. P RE -C OMBINING BASED M ETHODS

For pre-combining detectors, received signals from all antennas are combined first, then a cyclostationary feature of the
resulting signal is extracted before detecting the presence of
the PU.
Let us denote
y(n) = [y1 (n), y2 (n), . . . , yM (n)]T ,
h = [h1 , h2 , . . . , hM ]T ,
w(n) = [w1 (n), w2 (n), . . . , wM (n)] ,
T

(9)
(10)
(11)

Step 2: Apply the singular value decomposition (SVD)

(0 ).
to R
y
Step 3: Select the eigenvector corresponding to the max (0 ) as CSI estimate of the PU.
imum eigenvalue of R
y
Note that since the phase ambiguity does not affect the
detection performance, it is not a concern here.
as the estimated CSI of the PU, the combining
Denoting h
output becomes

H y(n).
z(n) = c

(18)

H
h
.
h

then we have
H0 : y(n) = w(n),
H1 : y(n) = hs(n) + w(n).

(12)

Since the detection probability is related to the signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) of the received signal, increasing the SNR
translates into better detection. If the SU has the channel state
information (CSI), h, under H1 , the maximum ratio combining
(MRC) can be used to enhance the reception of PUs signal.
Choosing the combining coefficients as
c=

h
,
h

(13)

the combining output becomes

H0 : z(n) = cH w(n),
H1 : z(n) = cH hs(n) + cH w(n).

(14)

Based on the combining output, z(n), a cyclostationary feature

can be extracted to detect the presence of the PU. In practice,
however, the SU may not have the CSI of the PU, thus schemes
for the SU to estimate the PUs CSI are required.
A. Blind Channel Estimation Based on Cyclic AF
It is hard to use pilot-based channel estimations here because we may not have the knowledge of PUs pilot and may
not be synchronized with the PU. Therefore a blind channel
estimation is proposed in this paper.
Let us define the cyclic AF matrix of y(n) as


H
j2nTs
R
y ( ) = E y(n)y (n )e
= hh

Rs ( )

R
w ( ),

B. BMRC-SCF Detector
Prior to presenting details of the BMRC-SCF, we provide
the following important lemma to emphasize the motivation
of using the cyclic SCF.
Lemma 4.1: The cyclic SCF has built-in ability to handle
noise uncertainty.
2
2
= w
,
Proof: Let the estimated noise power be
w
where is called the noise uncertainty. We can envision this
as noise w(t)

with variance times the variance of another

noise w(t). The magnitude of the cyclic SCF of w(t)
is given

(f
)|
=
|
(f
)|.
This
states
that
the
noise
uncertainty
by |
w
w

can be eliminated when the cyclic SCF is employed.

Now, we describe the BMRC-SCF detector with the following steps.
Step 1: Based on the received signals, use eigendecomposition method to estimate the CSI of PU.
Step 2: Calculate the combining output z(n).

Step 3: Calculate the cyclic SCF of z(n), z (f ).

Step 4: Make decisions based on the following algorithms:
Algorithm 1 :

(16)

Thus, eigenvalue-based channel estimation can be used to

estimate h, which involves the following steps.
Step 1: Estimate the sample cyclic AF matrix:
N
1

(0 ) = 1
R
y(n)yH (n 0 )ej2nTs . (17)
y
N n=0

H1

max |
z (f )| H0 1

(19)

H1
avg |

z (f )| H0 2

(20)

f F

Algorithm 2 :

f F

(15)

where Ts is the sampling interval, Rs ( ) and R

w ( ) are the
cyclic AF of the PUs signal and noise, respectively. Since the
noises are stationary in all the received antennas, R
w ( ) = 0
for all s when = 0, regardless of whether noise samples
are correlated in spatial or temporal domain. Choosing 0 =
arg max |Rs ( )| we have
H
R
y (0 ) = hh Rs (0 ), = 0.

=
This combining method is called the blind
where c
MRC (BMRC).
Next, we present the BMRC with cyclic SCF (BMRC-SCF)
detector, followed by the BMRC with modified cyclic SDF
(BMRC-MSDF) detector.

where F is a set of frequency in the supporting range,

1 and 2 are thresholds used for signal detection in
Algorithm 1 and Algorithm 2, respectively.
Now, let us look at the performance of the proposed detector
under correlated noise environment. Without loss of generality,
we consider Algorithm 1. Let
T1 =

max |

z (f )|,

f F

(21)

and pT1 |H0 (t1 ) be the probability density function (PDF) of T1

under H0 . For a given threshold 1 , the probability of false
alarm for Algorithm 1 is given by

(T1 )
pT1 |H0 (t1 )dt1 .
(22)
Pf a =
1

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE DySPAN 2010 proceedings

We are interested in comparing the probability of false alarm

for the following two cases:
Case 1: Noise samples are independent and identically
distributed (i.i.d.) in both temporal and spatial domains.
For this case, wm (n) follows the same distribution as
white noise um (n), and has zero-mean and variance
2
for all ms.
E[|wm (n)|2 ] = w
Case 2: Noise samples are either spatially or temporally
correlated. Since the analysis for both types of correlation is similar, we consider temporally correlated noise
generated as follows:
wm (n) =

L
m 1

gm (l)um (n l),

(23)

l=0

where gm (l)s are the linear filters of each colored

noise, wm (n), which has zero-mean, and variance
2
for all ms.
E[|wm (n)|2 ] = w
Under H0 , the combining output of the noises becomes
w(n) =
M

M


(24)

Notice that
cm |2 = 1. For Case 1, w(n) follows
m=1 |
the same distribution as any um (n), denoted as u(n) for
simplicity, thus we have
D

z
u,

(25)

where denotes converges in distribution.

Now, let us consider Case 2. The combining output of the
noises is
w(n) =

gm (l)um (n l),

(26)

m=1 l=0

where gm (l) = cm gm (l). The estimated cyclic SDF of the

output noise can be determined as [10]

(f ) =
Sw

V2 = |G|V1 .

(30)

It is obvious that V2 is a r.v. with smaller value than V1 . Let

us denote the probability of Vi given the hypothesis H0 as
pVi |H0 (vi ), i = 1, 2. The relationship between pV1 |H0 (v1 ) and
pV2 |H0 (v2 ) is as follows [16].
 
v2
1
pV1 |H0
.
(31)
pV2 |H0 (v2 ) =
|G|
|G|
Given a threshold o , the false alarm probability of V2 is

(V )
pV2 |H0 (v2 )dv2
(32)
Pf a 2 =
o

pV1 |H0 (v1 )dv1
(33)
=
o
|G|

(V )

cm wm (n).

m=1

M L
m 1


threshold. To verify this statement explicitly, let V1 and V2 be

the magnitude of
w (f ) for white noise and colored noise,
respectively. Then,


 

Gm f
S (f ),
Gm f +
2
2 um
m=1
M


where Gm (f ) denotes the frequency response of

Sum (f ) is the estimated cyclic SDF of um (n),
non-zero random variable (r.v.) due to imperfect
Substituting (27) in (3), the estimated cyclic SCF
as follows.

w (f ) = G
um (f ),

(27)

gm (l), and
which is a
estimation.
is obtained
(28)

where we define


M

m=1 Gm f + 2 Gm f 2

G= 

 M

 . (29)
M
2
2

m=1 Gm f + 2
m =1 Gm f 2
In the Appendix, it is proven that 0 < |G| 1. For white
noises, |G| = 1, while for colored noises, 0 < |G| < 1.
This implies that the false alarm probability based on colored
noise is less than that based on white noise for any given

Equation (33) indicates that Pf a2 can be obtained from

pV1 |H0 (v1 ) with a larger threshold, resulting in smaller area
(V )
(V )
of integration. Hence, Pf a2 < Pf a1 . This concludes that
the false alarm probability of a detector using the cyclic SCF
with the MRC would never exceed the false alarm probability
constraint for correlated noise scenario.
We conclude the above with the following lemma.
Lemma 4.2: The BMRC-SCF detector has built-in ability
to effectively handle both uncorrelated and correlated noise
environments.
Finally, the motivation for proposing Algorithm 2 is to enhance the performance in colored noise scenario by smoothing
the cyclic SCF using averaging operation. Note that more than
one cycle frequency can be used to improve the performance of
the detector with the expense of increasing the computational
complexity. Note also that the cyclic SCF has been used for
modulation classification [1719], and also for signal detection
in single antenna case [17].
C. BMRC-MSDF Detector
Although, the cyclic SCF can handle the noise uncertainty
and correlated noise as proved in Lemma 4.1 and Lemma 4.2,
it requires high computational complexity due to the cyclic
SDF at both nominator and denominator, which might not be
preferable in practice. Besides, if the denominator part of the
cyclic SCF is very small at some frequencies for the hypothesis
H0 , it would result in higher false alarm rate. To solve the
mentioned issues, we propose to use the following parameter
as the test statistic.
S (f )
,
(34)
Tz (f ) = z

where the denominator represents the average energy of the

normalized output signal from the BMRC, and is defined as
=

zH z
.
N

(35)

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE DySPAN 2010 proceedings

It can be readily observed that for noise-only case, is

equivalent to the denominator of (3) as N , and requires
less computational complexity. Since is independent of
the frequency, it solves the problem of having nulls in the
denominator of
z (f ) used in the BMRC-SCF detector. To
detect the presence of the PU, the following test is performed:
1
avg |Tz (f )| H
H0 3 .

f F

(36)

The reason for choosing the averaging operation instead of

the maximum operation is for the effectiveness against colored
noise since |Tz (f )| does not possess the ability to deal with
correlated noise. Using the maximum operation could cause
high false alarm rate.

Unlike pre-combining detectors, post-combining detectors

extract a cyclostationary feature from each antenna before
employing them to detect the PU. Here, a linear combiner
is considered for combining all obtained features for signal
detection. In general, an optimal linear combiner would apply
an optimal weight to each antenna before combining in order
to maximize the detection probability, Pd . However, since
obtaining the optimal weights, if feasible, is quite a formidable
task and the optimal weights should be related to PUs signal
and channel, which are usually unavailable before sensing,
a suboptimal linear combiner is considered here by setting
weighting factors equal to one at all antennas. Two postcombining detectors called the linear combining with the
cyclic SCF (LC-SCF) detector and the linear combining with
the modified cyclic SDF (LC-MSDF) detector are proposed
next.
A. LC-SCF Detector
Two algorithms for LC-SCF detection are provided as
follows:

Algorithm 4 :

max

f F

avg

M

m=1
M


f F m=1

w
m (n) =

L
m 1

gm (l)um (n l).

(39)

l=0

Employing samples of w
m (n) to calculate the cyclic SCF and
determining its magnitude, we obtain the following:

w
m (f )| = |
um (f )|.

(40)

The result in (40) states that the effect of the noise correlation
disappears. Hence, exploiting the cyclic SCF together with the
linear combiner is effective against correlated noise.
B. LC-MSDF Detector

V. P OST-C OMBINING BASED M ETHODS

Algorithm 3 :

to similar structure of the considered linear combiner. By using

correlated noise as input, the noise sample n at antenna m can
be written as shown below.

H1
|

ym (f )| H0 4

(37)

H1
|

ym (f )| H0 5

(38)

Since no channel knowledge is required here, channel estimation issues are irrelevant. This could be advantageous
in practice, where a complicated channel estimation might
be required. Note that unlike thresholds for pre-combining
detectors considered previously, thresholds for post-combining
detectors are dependent on the number of antenna at the SU.
Similar to the BMRC-SCF detector, the LC-SCF detector
is also able to handle colored noise as proven in the lemma
below.
Lemma 5.1: The LC-SCF detector has built-in ability to
effectively handle both uncorrelated and correlated noise environments.
Proof: For the LC-SCF detector, we need to check its
effectiveness against correlated noise at one antenna only due

The LC-MSDF detector is proposed for complexity reduction as in the case of the BMRC-MSDF detector. The detection
of the PU is carried out as shown below:
avg

M


f F m=1

1
|Tym (f )| H
H0 6 ,

(41)

where Tym (f ) is determined from (34) using received samples

at antenna m. Similar to the BMRC-MSDF detector, the
LC-MSDF detector should be robust to both correlated and
uncorrelated noise.
VI. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
In this section, simulation results are presented to provide
the insight into the performance of all proposed detectors. We
consider flat fading channels for all antennas. Assume that
the PU transmits BPSK signals with symbol duration equal to
25 sec at the carrier frequency of 80 kHz. Unless otherwise
stated, we employ the following parameters for all numerical
results. The number of antenna at the SU is 2. The sampling
rate used is 320 kHz. The number of observed samples is 4000.
To estimate the cyclic SDF, we set P = 4 and Ns = 100. The
false alarm probability is set to 0.1.
Figure 1 shows the performance of the blind channel estimation in spatially correlated noise scenario. Let us define the
spatial correlation coefficient as = E{nH
i nj }, where ni and
nj are column vectors containing noise samples at antenna i
and j, respectively. In the simulation, we set = 0 and 0.5. For
the cyclic AF, = 4. Let us call the cyclic AF when = 0 and
= 0 as the conventional AF. We use Perfect, Cyclic, and
Conv for perfect estimation, and blind estimation using the
cyclic AF and conventional AF, respectively. Only the result of
the BMRC-MSDF is shown here for clarity. The result verifies
that the blind channel estimation using the cyclic AF provides
superior performance than that employing the conventional AF
when = 0. When = 0, the cyclic AF and conventional AF
have comparable performance.
The performance of all detectors in white noise scenario
are shown in Figure 2. As expected, pre-combining detectors
provide superior results to post-combining detectors since
they exploit the channel information. The best detector turns

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE DySPAN 2010 proceedings

TABLE I
T HE FALSE ALARM PROBABILITY FOR ALL DETECTORS IN CORRELATED
NOISE SCENARIO .

Perfect ( = 0)
Cyclic ( = 0)
Conv ( = 0)
Perfect ( = 0.5)
Cyclic ( = 0.5)
Conv ( = 0.5)

0.9
0.8
0.7

0.6

(a) Pre-combining detectors

BMRC-SCF (Algo. 1) BMRC-SCF (Algo. 2) BMRC-MSDF
Pf a

0.067

0.021

0.092

(b) Post-combining detectors

0.5
0.4

Pf a

0.3

LC-SCF (Algo. 3)

LC-SCF (Algo. 4)

LC-MSDF

0.093

0.01

0.064

0.2
0.1

0
20

15

10

0.9

SNR (dB)

Fig. 1.

0.8

The performance of blind channel estimation based.

0.7

0.8

0.7

0.6
d

BMRCSCF (Algo. 1)
BMRCSCF (Algo. 2)
BMRCMSDF
LCSCF (Algo. 3)
LCSCF (Algo. 4)
LCMSDF

0.9

BMRCSCF (Algo. 1)
BMRCSCF (Algo. 2)
BMRCMSDF
LCSCF (Algo. 3)
LCSCF (Algo. 4)
LCMSDF

0.5
0.4
0.3

0.6

0.2

0.5

0.1

0.4

0
20

15

10

SNR (dB)

0.3

Fig. 3.

0.2

The detection probability for correlated noise scenario.

0.1
0
20

15

10

SNR (dB)

Fig. 2.

The detection probability for uncorrelated noise scenario.

out to be the BMRC-MSDF. Even with less computational

complexity, it slightly outperforms the BMRC-SCF detector.
Among post-combining detectors, it is shown that the LCMSDF provides the best result. This indicates that the proposed modified cyclic SDF can perform well in both detector
classes.
In Figure 3, the effectiveness of all detectors to temporally
correlated noise is investigated. To generate colored noise
samples, we pass white noise samples through a temporal
correlation filter. The filter used for all antennas is written in a
vector form as g1 = [1, 1, 1]. The false alarm probability of
pre-combining and post-combining detectors is shown in Table
I. All false alarm rates are lower than the pre-determined one,
suggesting that all detectors are effective against the effect
of noise correlation. It also verifies Lemma 4.2 and Lemma
5.1. For BMRC-SCF detectors, it is observed that Algorithm
1 provides better performance than Algorithm 2 at all SNR

ranges. This is due to the smoothing effect as mentioned in

Section IV. As for the LC-SCF, Algorithm 1 performs worse
than Algorithm 2 at very low SNR, but starts to achieve better
result as SNR increases. It is observed that the performances
of detectors employing the modified cyclic SDF are relatively
close to those using the cyclic SCF in this case.
The effect of the number of antennas on the detection rate is
studied in Figure 3 for white noise scenario. For clarity, only
the BMRC-MSDF and LC-MSDF detectors are considered in
the simulation. The number of antenna, M , is set to 2, 4, and 6.
The result shows that as the number of antenna increases, the
performance gap between the BMRC-MSDF and LC-MSDF
increases. This is because pre-combining detectors achieve
higher gain from exploiting more channel knowledge, while
post-combining detectors have no channel information to take
advantage of.
VII. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, cyclostationarity-based detectors are considered for spectrum sensing in multi-antenna cognitive radio
systems. The cyclic SCF and modified cyclic SDF are used
as cyclostationary features in signal detection. Pre-combining
detectors based on the BMRC, called the BMRC-SCF and

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE DySPAN 2010 proceedings

where (b) is from the following.

  |bm am |2
  |bm am |2  |bm am |2
=

2
2
2


m
m
m

1
0.9

m =m

0.8

2
m m
  |am bm |2
=
.
2

m

0.7

0.6

 |bm am |2
m

m =m

0.5

R EFERENCES

BMRCMSDF (M = 6)
LCMSDF (M = 6)
BMRCMSDF (M = 4)
LCMSDF (M = 4)
BMRCMSDF (M = 2)
LCMSDF (M = 2)

0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
20

15

10

SNR (dB)

Fig. 4.

  |bm am |2

The effect of the number of antenna on the detection probability.

BMRC-MSDF detectors, are proposed. To estimate channel

coefficients, the eigenvalue-based blind channel estimation
exploiting the cyclic AF is considered. For post-combining
detectors, linear combiner is incorporated with the considered
features to provide the LC-SCF and LC-MSDF detectors.
Analysis is given to prove the built-in ability of the cyclic
SCF to handle the noise uncertainty and noise correlation. All
detectors are shown to be effective in both uncorrelated and
correlated noise scenarios. Pre-combining detectors perform
better than post-combining ones since the channel knowledge
is exploited. It is observed that detectors using the modified
cyclic SDF can achieve comparable performance with less
computational complexity compared to those using the cyclic
SDF.

VIII. A PPENDIX

Defining am = Gm f + 2 and bm = Gm f
magnitude squared of G can be expressed as

, the

 
|am |2 |bm |2 + m m =m am bm am bm
 

2
2
2
2
m |am | |bm | +
m
m =m |am | |bm |


|G|2

(a)

1,

where (a) is from the fact that

  |am bm |2 + |bm am |2
 





a
b
a
b

m m m m

2
m m =m

m m =m

(b)

 
m

m =m

|am |2 |bm |2 ,

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