Maximum eigenvalue and energy combined spectrum sensing algorithm

Energy detection (ED) method for spectrum sensing does not require any information of the source signal and channel, as well as it is suitable for detecting independent identically distributed signals. Covariance matrix catches the signal correlations and the maximum eigenvalue detection (MED) method is better than the ED for correlated signals. In this paper, taking the advantages of the two algorithms, a combined method of the maximum eigenvalue and energy of the signal is proposed to achieve detection performance improvements. The proposed method is a generalization of the ED and MED methods, which takes the ED and MED algorithms as special cases. The theoretical analysis on detection probability, false alarm probability and threshold are given, and the optimum parameter selection of the proposed method is discussed. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.