Performance of Detectors for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Under Laplacian Noise

Abstract

Electronic systems in general can be impaired by
impulsive noise generated by a variety of sources. Spectrum
sensors are of particular interest herein, since their probabilities
of detection and false alarm can be severely degraded under this
impairment. Several models for impulsive noise have been studied
in the literature, all of them having the common characteristic
of being well represented by heavy-tailed probability density
functions, like Laplace and some Stable distributions. This
article addresses the performances of state-of-the-art detectors
for cooperative spectrum sensing when the received signal is
impaired by Laplacian noise. This is made by means of estimating
the probability of detection for a fixed false alarm rate, when
important system parameters are varied. It is demonstrated
that the robustness against impulsive noise varies significantly
depending on the adopted detection strategy.