Kronecker-based fusion rule for cooperative spectrum sensing with multi-antenna receivers

© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This paper considers a novel fusion rule for spectrum sensing scheme for a cognitive radio network with multi-antenna receivers. The proposed scheme exploits the fact that when any primary signal is present, measurements are spatially correlated due to presence of inter-antenna and inter-receiver spatial correlation. In order to exploit this spatial structure, the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) operates with the determinant of the sample covariance matrix. Therefore, it depends on the sample size N and the dimensionality of the received data (i.e., the number of receivers K and antennas L). However, when the dimensionality fK; Lg is on the order, or larger than the sample size N, the GLRT degenerates due to the ill-conditioning of the sample covariance matrix. In order to circumvent this issue, we propose two techniques that exploit the inner spatial structure of the received observations by using single pair and multi-pairs Kronecker products. The performance of the proposed detectors is evaluated by means of numerical simulations, showing important advantages with respect to the traditional (i.e., unstructured) GLRT approach.