Information Theoretic Criteria based Spectrum Sensing for Opportunistic Channel Access

Spectrum scarcity is a critical issue in wireless communication for the deployment of new services or improvising the existing ones. Opportunistic channel access is a reliable method to solve this problem. In this method, spectrum sensing is the most fundamental challenge. Information Theoretic Criterion (ITC) based blind spectrum sensing is popularly employed in most of the wireless communication systems. A modified form of Original ITC (OITC), namely the Simplified ITC (SITC) has been recently developed, with very less computational complexity and no sacrifice in sensing performance. However, in the existing works, the performance of the SITC algorithm is not explored as a function of the channel behavior. In this paper, it is first verified that the performance of SITC and OITC are the same using Probability of Detection (PD) versus Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) plots. Then, SITC is applied for channel environments with different power profiles and varying number of channel taps and varying number of sensing antennas. The simulation results illustrate that SITC performance in a uniform profile channel is better and it improves with increase in the number of channel taps and sensing antennas.