Study on simple signal area estimation for efficient spectrum measurements

This paper investigates a signal area (SA) estimation method for spectrum measurements. The spectrum measurements is for estimating statistical information of spectrum usage and required latency is not very critical compared to spectrum sensing. SA denotes the area (in time/frequency domain) occupied by the primary user’s signal. The traditional approach, which utilizes Fourier transform (FT) and energy detector (ED) for SA estimation, can achieve low complexity, but its estimation performance is not very high. For this issue, we propose a post-processing, simple SA (S-SA) estimation. S-SA estimation exploits the correlation of the spectrum states among the neighboring tiles, i.e., time/frequency grids, and the fact that SA typically has a rectangular shape to estimate SA with high accuracy and relatively low complexity compared to a conventional method, contour tracing based SA (CT-SA) estimation. Numerical results will show that the S-SA estimation method can achieve better detection performance than CT-SA. Furthermore, it can reduce the computation time compared to the CT-SA estimation.