Cognitive radio is a promising technology for alleviating the spectrum shortage
problem which is caused by current fixed spectrum allocation policy. With a smart antenna
configured in a secondary user, this paper proposes a newspectrum sensing algorithm exploiting
the correlation of channel gains between antenna elements. The proposed method detects
the primary user signal with the test-statistics based on antenna correlation. Compared to
available antenna correlation based spectrum sensing algorithm, the proposed algorithm can
determine easily the decision threshold level for achieving required false alarm probability
under given number of samples, and achieves a better performance. Finally, the proposed
algorithm is verified by numerical simulation.
