Spectrum sensing for OFDM signals using pilot induced cyclostationarity in the presence of cyclic frequency offset

In this paper, the problem of spectrum sensing of OFDM signals for cognitive radios is considered. It is proposed to detect the cyclostationary features introduced in an OFDM signal due to inter-pilot correlation. The performance of the proposed detector is derived and verified in case of AWGN channels. It is observed that the performance of cyclostationary detectors relies on the knowledge of the exact value of the cyclic frequency of the signal of interest. However, an offset in the cyclic frequency may arise due to several reasons. Therefore, for the proposed detector to perform reliably, there is a need to estimate the cyclic frequency offset. The Cramer–Rao bound for the cyclic frequency offset (CFO) estimator is derived, and based on it, two algorithms to estimate and compensate for the CFO are proposed. Simulation results are then used to study the performance of the proposed detection technique under Rayleigh fading both in the presence and the absence of CFO. The performance of the proposed system model is also studied under fast fading, and an alternative test statistic is proposed.