Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Using Goodness of Fit Testing

One of the most important challenges in cognitive radio is how to measure or sense the existence of a signal transmission in a specific channel, that is, how to conduct spectrum sensing. In this letter, we first formulate spectrum sensing as a goodness of fit testing problem, and then apply the Anderson-Darling test, one of goodness of fit tests, to derive a sensing method called Anderson-Darting sensing. It is shown by both analysis and numerical results that under the same sensing conditions and channel environments, Anderson-Darling sensing has much higher sensitivity to detect an existing signal than energy detector-based sensing, especially in a case where the received signal has a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) without prior knowledge of primary user signals.