Optimal MTM spectral estimation based detection for cognitive radio in HDTV

Cognitive radio based systems rely on spectrum sensing techniques to detect whitespaces to exploit. For the sake of ease of implementation, simple schemes such as energy detector have been proposed and studied widely. However, such simple schemes perform far from optimally, thereby affecting the performance of the underlying system. On the other hand sophisticated detectors are difficult to implement, giving rise to a trade-off. This paper explores the idea of using spectral estimates for detection. The case of HDTV based cognitive radio is explored and an optimal detection scheme following multi taper estimation is proposed and studied. © 2012 IEEE.