Cognitive radio is a new concept of reusing a licensed spectrum in an unlicensed manner. The motivation for cognitive radio is various measurements of spectrum utilization, that generally show unused resources in frequency, time and space. These "spectrum holes" could be exploited by cognitive radios. Some studies suggest that the spectrum is extremely underutilized, and that these spectrum holes could provide ten times the capacity of all existing wireless devices together. The spectrum could be reused either during time periods where the primary system is not active, or in geographical positions where the primary system is not operating. In this paper, we deal primarily with the concept of geographical reuse, in a frequency-planned primary network. We perform an analysis of the potential for communication in a geographical spectrum hole, and in particular the achievable sum-rate for a secondary network, to some order of magnitude. Simulation results show that a substantial sum-rate could be achieved if the secondary users communicate over small distances. For a small number of secondary links, the sum-rate increases linearly with the number of links. However, the spectrum hole gets saturated quite fast, due to interference caused by the secondary users. A spectrum hole may look large, but it disappears as soon as someone starts using it.

We consider detection of signals encoded with orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC), using multiple receive antennas. Such signals contain redundancy and they have a specific structure, that can be exploited for detection. We derive the optimal detector, in the Neyman-Pearson sense, when all parameters are known. We also consider unknown noise variance, signal variance and channel coefficients. We propose a number of GLRT based detectors for the different cases, that exploit the redundancy structure of the OSTBC signal. We also propose an eigenvalue-based detector for the case when all parameters are unknown. The proposed detectors are compared to the energy detector. We show that when only the noise variance is known, there is no gain in exploiting the structure of the OSTBC. However, when the noise variance is unknown there can be a significant gain.

This paper deals with the problem of discriminating samples that contain only noise from samples that contain a signal embedded in noise. The focus is on the case when the variance of the noise is unknown. We derive the optimal soft decision detector using a Bayesian approach. The complexity of this optimal detector grows exponentially with the number of observations and as a remedy, we propose a number of approximations to it. The problem under study is a fundamental one and it has applications in signal denoising, anomaly detection, and spectrum sensing for cognitive radio. We illustrate the results in the context of the latter.

Cognitive radio is a new concept of reusing licensed spectrum in an unlicensed manner. Cognitive radio is motivated by recent measurements of spectrum utilization, showing unused resources in frequency, time and space. The spectrum must be sensed to detect primary user signals, in order to allow cognitive radios in a primary system. In this thesis we study some topics in spectrum sensing for cognitive radio.

The fundamental problem of spectrum sensing is to discriminate samples that contain only noise from samples that contain a very weak signal embedded in noise. We derive detectors that exploit known structures of the signal, for the cases of an OFDM modulated signal and an orthogonal space-time block coded signal. We derive optimal detectors, in the Neyman-Pearson sense, for a few different cases when all parameters are known. Moreover we study detection when the parameters, such as noise variance, are unknown. We propose solutions the problem of unknown parameters.

We also study system aspects of cognitive radio. More specifically, we investigate spectrum reuse of geographical spectrum holes in a frequency planned primary network. System performance is measured in terms of the achievable rate for the cognitive radio system. Simulation results show that a substantial sum-rate could be achieved if the cognitive radios communicate over small distances. However, the spectrum hole gets saturated quite fast, due to interference caused by the cognitive radios.