Fast two-step energy detection for spectrum sensing

Spectrum sensing is one of the key tasks in cognitive radio. This paper proposes a fast two-step energy detection (FED) algorithm for spectrum sensing via improving the sampling process of conventional energy detection (CED). The algorithm adaptively selects N -point or 2 N -point sampling by comparing its observed energy with prefixed double thresholds, and thereby is superior in sampling time and detection speed. Moreover, under the constraint of constant false alarm, this paper optimizes the thresholds from maximizing detection probability point of view. Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that, compared with CED, the proposed FED can achieve significant gain in detection speed at the expense of slight accuracy loss. Specifically, within high signal-to-noise ratio regions, as much as 25% of samples can be reduced.