We consider spectrum sensing of OFDM signals in an AWGN channel. For  the case of completely known noise and signal powers, we set up  a vector-matrix model for an OFDM signal with a cyclic prefix and  derive the optimal Neyman-Pearson detector from first  principles. The optimal detector exploits the inherent correlation  of the OFDM signal incurred by the repetition of data in the cyclic  prefix, using knowledge of the length of the cyclic prefix and the  length of the OFDM symbol. We compare the optimal detector to the energy  detector numerically. We show that the energy detector is  near-optimal (within 1 dB SNR) when the noise variance is  known. Thus, when the noise power is known, no substantial gain can  be achieved by using any other detector than the energy detector.

For the case of completely unknown noise and signal powers, we  derive a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) based onempirical second-order statistics of  the received data. The proposed GLRT detector exploits the  non-stationary correlation structure of the OFDM signal and does not  require any knowledge of the noise power or the signal power. The  GLRT detector is compared to state-of-the-art OFDM signal detectors,  and shown to improve the detection performance with 5 dB SNR in  relevant cases.

In this paper, we create a unified framework for spectrum sensing of signals which have covariance matrices with known eigenvalue multiplicities. We derive the generalized likelihood-ratio test (GLRT) for this problem, with arbitrary eigenvalue multiplicities under both hypotheses. We also show a number of applications to spectrum sensing for cognitive radio and show that the GLRT for these applications, of which some are already known, are special cases of the general result.

We consider spectrum sensing of a second-order cyclostationary signal receivedat multiple antennas. The proposed detector exploits both the spatial andthe temporal correlation of the received signal, from knowledge of thefundamental period of the cyclostationary signal and the eigenvaluemultiplicities of the temporal covariance matrix. All other parameters, suchas the channel gains or the noise power, are assumed to be unknown. The proposeddetector is shown numerically to outperform state-of-the-art detectors forspectrum sensing of anOFDM signal, both when using a single antenna and with multiple antennas.

We consider detection of signals encoded with orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC), using multiple receive antennas. Such signals contain redundancy and they have a specific structure, that can be exploited for detection. We derive the optimal detector, in the Neyman-Pearson sense, when all parameters are known. We also consider unknown noise variance, signal variance and channel coefficients. We propose a number of GLRT based detectors for the different cases, that exploit the redundancy structure of the OSTBC signal. We also propose an eigenvalue-based detector for the case when all parameters are unknown. The proposed detectors are compared to the energy detector. We show that when only the noise variance is known, there is no gain in exploiting the structure of the OSTBC. However, when the noise variance is unknown there can be a significant gain.

In this work, we consider spectrum sensing of Gaussian signals with structured covariance matrices. We show that the optimal detector based on the probability distribution of the sample covariance matrix is equivalent to the optimal detector based on the raw data, if the covariance matrices are known. However, the covariance matrices are unknown in general. Therefore, we propose to estimate the unknown parameters using covariance matching estimation techniques (COMET). We also derive the optimal detector based on a Gaussian approximation of the sample covariance matrix, and show that this is closely connected to COMET.

This paper deals with the problem of discriminating samples that contain only noise from samples that contain a signal embedded in noise. The focus is on the case when the variance of the noise is unknown. We derive the optimal soft decision detector using a Bayesian approach. The complexity of this optimal detector grows exponentially with the number of observations and as a remedy, we propose a number of approximations to it. The problem under study is a fundamental one and it has applications in signal denoising, anomaly detection, and spectrum sensing for cognitive radio. We illustrate the results in the context of the latter.