A cost-effective approach for spectrum sensing using beamforming

Spectrum sensing (SS) is one of the principal challenges on which the mobile communication is based on. Identifying the available frequency bands, also called white spaces, is the main issue. A novel blind approach for SS in the narrowband context is proposed in order to improve the signal detection. Considering a channel with its angle of arrival (AoA), we use beamforming technique to exploit the maximum and minimum angular energy. Both theoretical developments of the threshold and performance analysis are developed. To validate our contribution, the analytical results of the performance developed in this paper are compared with those from simulation. A comparison of state-of-the-art SS method using the eigenvalue decomposition is provided which brings an interesting trade-off between complexity and performance. Finally, simulation results considering the probability of misdetection under very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are presented.