International conference on Communication and Signal Processing, April 3-5, 2013, India

Cognitive Radio Energy Based Spectrum

Sensing using MIMO
Jenishkumar.S.Gamit Sameer.D.Trapasiya

Abstract Today, energy spectrum is in high demand as the

usage of the spectrum increase day by day at a tremendous rate;
there is a need to find a way to efficiently utilize these scarce
resources, cognitive radio is a huge step towards this. An
enormous research papers have been published in various
international conferences as well as journals in the last few years
to make cognitive radio applicable with various applications as
well as to make it better suit with various environmental
scenarios. On the other side MIMO opened the door for many
researches in the form of high diversity and reliability achieved
within it compared to SISO. Very much research has been noticed
in each individual direction but very few approach found in
literature where both are combined & utilized. In this research
paper cognitive radio scheme is implemented with MIMO, energy
spectrum sensing is used for spectrum sensing as it is a simple and
easy to implement. The simulation results indicate MIMOcognitive radio outcomes SISO-cognitive radio. Simulation results
have been expressed with various modulation techniques and
detection probability and false probability are used as
performance metrics.
Index Terms Cognitive radio (CR), Multiple-Input MultipleOutput system model, Single-Input Single-output system model,
Simulation.

I. INTRODUCTION

ognitive radio is an intelligent wireless communication

system that is being aware of its environment, learns from
it and adapts it transmission features according to variations in
the environment to maximize utilization of resources such as
spectrum while ensuring good QoS. Two main entities are
introduced, namely primary and secondary users transmit and
receive signals over the licensed spectra. The secondary users
should have the ability to measure the radio environment and
intelligently exploit the unused licensed spectrum and
relinquish it when primary users are active. Key to the
successful operation of CR systems is to measure the wireless
environments over wide frequency bands and identify
spectrum holes and occupied bands. The challenge is

Jenishkumar.S.Gamit is now with Department of Electronics &

Communication Engineering, G. H. Patel College of Engineering &
Technology, V. V. Nagar(e-mail: jenishgamit@yahoo.in)
Sameer.D.Trapasiya Department of Electronics & Communication
Engineering, G. H. Patel College of Engineering & Technology, V. V.
Nagar(e-mail: sameertrapasiya@gmail.com)

in the identification and detection of primary user signals

harsh and Noisy environments. Speed and accuracy of
measurement are the main metrics to determine the suitable
spectrum sensing technique for CR. Accuracy of the estimation
depends on frequency resolution. Greater the
frequency
resolution, more accurate the estimated power at each
frequency. There are other important metrics too. One is the
right tradeoff between the time and frequency resolution
achievable. Due to the uncertainty principle, it is not possible
to have the best frequency and time resolution at the same time
[14].
The increasing demand for networks has turned spectrum
into a precious resource. For this reason, there is always a need
for methods to pack more bits per Hz. A particular solution
that has caught the researchers attention is the use of multiple
antennas at both transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX). Such a
system is called a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO)
system. Advantages of MIMO systems include [12]:
Beamforming - A transmitter receiver pair can perform
beamforming and direct their main beams at each
other, thereby increasing the receivers received
power and consequently the SNR.
Spatial diversity - A signal can be coded through the
transmit antennas, creating redundancy, which
reduces the outage probability.
Spatial multiplexing - A set of streams can be
transmitted in parallel, each using a different transmit
antenna element. The receiver can then perform the
appropriate signal processing to separate the signals.
It is important to note that each antenna element on a
MIMO system operates on the same frequency and therefore
does not require extra bandwidth. Also, the total power
through all antenna elements is less than or equal to that of a
single antenna system, i.e.
N

p
k =1

(1)

Where N is the total number of antenna elements, pk is the

power allocated through the kth antenna element and P is the
power if the system had a single antenna element. Effectively,
(1) ensures that a MIMO system consumes no extra power due
to its multiple antenna elements.
In this paper, we will use multiple antenna technique using
energy detection sensing. We are going to simulate the results
for probability of detection and probability of failure and
compare these results with the results of SISO technique.

978-1-4673-4866-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

708

The paper is organized as follows. In section II, the

literature review is discussed. In section III, general
background information on MIMO and SISO is provided.
Mathematical evaluation is discussed in section IV. Results are
presented in section V. Finally, section VI concludes this
paper.
II.

LITERATURE REVIEW

In paper (Amna Saad Kamil, Ibrahim Khider 2008) after

several studies indicating that up to 90% of the allocated radio
spectrum less than 3GHz is idle most of the time. Current
researches are investigating different techniques of using
cognitive radio to reuse more locally unused spectrums to
increase the total system capacity. Cognitive radios have a
great potential to improve spectrum utilization by enabling
users to access the spectrum dynamically without disturbing
licensed primary radios. This paper presents some of the
cognitive radio issues used to determine the effectiveness in
wireless communication. These characteristics are crucial
when applying the cognitive radios in order to determine the
effectiveness and reliability of wireless networks. Spectrum
management, unlicensed spectrum usage, spectrum sharing,
hidden node and sharing issues, security, and complexity are
introduced [10].
In
paper ( D. D. Ariananda, M. K. Lakshmanan,
H. Nikookar 2009) they discussed CR is an intelligent wireless
communication system that is cognizant of its environment,
learns from it and adapts it transmission features according to
the utilization of resources such as spectrum while ensuring
good QoS. Key to the successful operation of CR systems is to
gauge the wireless environments over wide frequency bands
and identify spectrum holes and occupied bands. The
challenge is in the identification and detection of primary user
signals amidst harsh and noisy environments. In this context,
speed and accuracy of measurement are the main metrics to
determine the suitable spectrum sensing technique for CR.
Accuracy of the estimation depends on frequency resolution.
Greater the frequency resolution, more accurate the estimated
power at each frequency. They reviewed of traditional
spectrum estimation techniques which are based on estimation
through detection of pilots, features or energy. It is not
possible to simultaneously have best frequency and time
resolutions. A good time resolution is necessary to locate
discontinuities in the time domain signal. The time resolution
can be compromised for segments of the signal which are
stationary for long periods of time or slow varying .The theory
of wavelet stands for spectrum estimation applications.
Wavelet has the properties required to dynamically tune the
time and frequency resolution with diluted versions of the
wavelet and scaling functions. By taking advantage of the first
and second order derivative, the location of the frequency
boundaries of each band within the wide band of interest is
found. To conclude, the best spectrum sensing approach for
cognitive radio would be the ones which offer a tradeoff
between time-frequency resolutions with minimum complexity
[14].
In paper (Luis Miguel Cortes-pena 2009), presents a
detailed study of diversity for MIMO systems. The multiple

antennas allow MIMO systems to perform beamforming,

spatial multiplexing .Beamforming consists of transmitting the
same signal with different gain over all transmit antennas such
that the receiver signal is maximized. In spatial multiplexing
asset of streams can be transmitted in parallel, each using a
different transmit antenna element. The receiver can then
perform the appropriate signal processing to separate the
signals. They discuss Alamoutis space time block coding [12].
In paper (Mahmood A. Abdulsattar and Zahir A. Hussein
2012) they presented a DSP processor to be used as a
baseband energy detector based spectrum sensing for cognitive
radio (CR) under fading channels. The proposed technique is
a low complexity scheme by using two energy detectors and
not need prior information about the channel gain in
comparison with other methods. The radio spectrum used for
wireless communications is a finite resource. A band assigned
to a primary user may be absolutely free or idle at a particular
time. As a solution for the spectrum used inefficiently
problem, cognitive radio (CR) proposes an opportunistic
spectrum usage approach in which frequency bands that are
not being used by their licensed users, also called the primary
user (PU), is utilized by cognitive radios, also called the
second user (SU). CR is a hybrid technology involving
software defined radio (SDR). The basic concept of the SDR is
that the radio can be totally configured or defined by the
software like mixer, filters, modulators, demodulators. Thus,
simply modifying the software, CR can completely change its
functionality or improve its performances, without replacing
hardware. This characteristic allows adding new features to
CR and improving its existing ability. They are proposing a
multiple antenna sensing in a multipath fading environment.
To reduce the multipath and shadowing effects of wireless
channels, diversity reception techniques (i.e. Multiple
antennas) provide promising solutions to improve BER
performances. Diversity means the providing of two or more
independent fading paths from transmitter to receiver. The
proposed scheme has minimum hardware used. Advantage of
energy detector technique is that it does not require knowledge
of transmitting signal of the primary user but it has the
disadvantage of requiring an accurate estimation of receiving
ambient noise .In urban regions where line of sight component
is often blocked by obstacles. In proposing a technique
diversity method first energy detector sums the output of
squared signals come from multiple antennas and secondary
energy detector summing the output comes from the first
energy detector and compared with threshold to making
decision [19].
III.

SYSTEM

MODEL

A. SISO system model

Energy detection is an optimal way to detect primary signals
when priori information of the primary signal is unknown to
secondary users. It measures the energy of the received
waveform over a specified observation time.
Energy Detector simply needs a band-pass filter; an analog
to digital converter, square law device and an Integrator. First
the input signal's bandwidth is limited to focusing through a

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band-pass filter. Then the filtered signal is squared and

integrated over an observation interval T. Finally the output of
the Integrator is compared with a threshold to decide whether a
primary signal exists or not. The block diagram of energy
detection is shown in Figure 1.

h1;1
h=
h2;1

h1;2
h2;2

(4)

IV. MATHEMATICAL EVALUATION

Signal detection can be reduced to a simple identification
problem, formalized as a hypothesis test.

H 1: x(n) = s (n) h + w(n)

H 0 : x(n) = w(n)

(5)

Fig. 1. SISO system model

The output of the energy detector can be given in time
domain using the block diagram:
N

E = x ( n)

(2)

n =1

Finally, this output signal E is compared to the threshold in

order to decide whether a signal is present or not in that
frequency band [15].

E or E

(3)

B. MIMO system model

MIMO systems are composed of three main elements,
namely the transmitter, the channel, and the receiver [12]. In
our simulation model we are going to use energy detection
sensing using multiple antenna technique. The block diagram
of the proposed model is given below.

Where x (n) is the received signal by secondary users, s (n) is

the transmitted signal of the primary user, h is the channel
coefficient; and w (n) is additive noise.
The output signal E in (2) is compared to the threshold in
order to decide whether a signal is present or not in that
frequency band [5].
E > decide signal absent
E < decide signal present
If the energy detection can be applied in a relay fading
environment the probability of false alarm Pf are given as
follows:
Probability of false alarm PFA for SISO [15]:

N
, 2
2 2 w
PFA =
N

2

(6)

Where (.) is the gamma function, which is defined as

( u ) = t u 1e t dt , and incomplete gamma function is given by

0

( a, s ) = t a 1e t dt [19].
s

Fig. 2. MIMO system model

Probability of false alarm PFA for MIMO [15] by using CDF

may be found using the following equation:

N , Nr

* 2
2
2 ( h j ) w
j =1

PFA =
(N )

A signal is transmitted by transmitter1 to the receiver1 and

receiver2 which has the same frequency. To take diversity
advantage with energy spectrum sensing multiple input
multiple output antennas (MIMO) approach can be used.
As signals receive from different antennas of MIMO in
which signal has the maximum good response is given to
energy detector. One signal is applied to the energy detector at
a time. The energy signal is compared with the threshold value
then the decision makers that decide signal present or not. The
channel matrix is:

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The probability of detection PD is found at:

PD =

1
erfc erfc 1 2 PFA X
2

(8)

For energy detection method maximum SNR is required.

Maximum SNR is given a better probability of detection. In
above fig. 4. We can see that when the SNR is increase it gives
a good probability of detection.

Where,
X=

V.

SIMULATION RESULT

In simulation, we evaluate the simulations for QPSK, 4QPSK, 64-QPSK modulated using energy detection method.
We evaluate the simulation for different SNR.
Fig. 5. PFA vs. SNR for SISO
In above fig. 5. PFA vs. SNR plot is given for SISO. Plot of
Pd vs. The SNR for SISO is given in fig. 6.

Fig. 3. PFA vs. SNR for MIMO

In fig. 3. We plot PFA vs. SNR using value of N= 2, 4, 8.
WE can see that when the SNR is increased than the
probability of failure is decreased.

Fig. 6. Pd vs. SNR for SISO

We can see from fig. 4. and fig. 6. MIMO gives good result
than SISO.
VI.

Fig. 4. Pd vs. SNR for MIMO

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

It has been found that if cognitive radios used with MIMO

than it outperform the SISO-cognitive radio. Results indicate
MIMO-cognitive radio gives better performance than the SISO
with cognitive radio in terms of reduced false alarm
probability and improved detection probability. MIMO
provides the diversity advantage compared to SISO & hence
improve performance. Simulation results have been found in
various modulation techniques & better results is obtained in
each case. This approach used here for the energy spectrum
sensing same approach can be further investigated for wavelet
spectrum sensing. Wavelet spectrum sensing gives best time &
frequency resolution among
all other spectrums sensing

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techniques. So, in future work the performance wavelet

spectrum sensing technique is evaluated & analyzed.
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