Degree of polarization detection: a dual-polarized antenna based spectrum sensing algorithm for cognitive radio

摘要

A new spectrum sensing algorithm-degree of polarization (DoP) sensing algorithm is proposed in this paper. By exploiting a pair of dual-polarized antenna at the receiver, DoP of the received vector signal is estimated and utilized to detect the presence of primary users based on the polarization characteristics of electromagnetic waves. The dual-polarized narrowband and broadband systems are both considered for DoP detection. In theoretical analysis, we derive the probability of detection, the probability of false and detection threshold of the proposed algorithm. It is shown that our algorithm overcomes the noise uncertainty problem. Considering the polarization-sensitive channel impairments, the impact of polarization mode dispersion on DoP detector is discussed. This method can be utilized for various signal detection applications without requiring the knowledge of signal, transmission channel, and noise power. In simulations based on wireless microphone signals, by applying polarization information signal carries, DoP achieves a better detection performance than arithmetic-to-geometric mean detector, the maximum-to-minimum ratio eigenvalue detector, and energy detector with noise uncertainty. The simulations based on digital video broadcasting-terrestrial signals are also presented, which may show the detection performance of the proposed method may be affected by polarization mode dispersion. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.