On the Noise Uncertainty for the Energy Detection of OFDM Signals.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technology for communication systems. This paper investigates the impacts of unknown noise variance on the popular spectrum sensing scheme, i.e., energy detection, for OFDM cognitive radios over multipath fading channels. To study the effects of unknown parameters on the energy detector, a new maximum-likelihood estimation of noise and signal powers employing the cyclic prefix of OFDM is presented in this paper. The mean values and Cram $\acute{\text{e}}$ r–Rao lower bounds of the estimation are obtained. Furthermore, the performances of the energy detector for both hypotheses, i.e., false-alarm rate and detection probability, under the influence of unknown noise variance are validated by both simulation and analytical results. The assessment on the required number of samples for the proposed energy detector is conducted, which indicates that an amount of 40–50% samples can be saved compared to the conventional energy detector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]