Cumulant-based blind cooperative spectrum sensing method for cognitive radio

Spectrum sensing is a crucial technology in cognitive radio (CR). Cumulant-based or higher order statistics (HOS) based spectrum sensing methods are often considered in literature for spectrum sensing because cumulants higher than 3-order can be used as a feature to distinguish non-Gaussian signals from Gaussian noise. However, most existing cooperative spectrum sensing methods are based on the assumption that the channel gain is available, which cannot be realistic in practice. In this paper, a novel cumulant-based cooperative spectrum sensing method is proposed. The proposed method does not depend on the noise power, channel gain, or the unknown signal parameters. Additionally, the proposed method is based on Neyman–Pearson (N–P) criteria, thus it is optimal in terms of the performance of detection probability if the false alarm probability is given in advance. Simulation results and analysis are presented to verify the validity and the superiority of the proposed cooperative spectrum sensing method over the existing ones.