Performance Evaluation of Energy Detector Based Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio using NI USRP-2930

This paper presents the performance evaluation of the Energy Detector technique, which is one of the most popular Spectrum Sensing (SS) technique for Cognitive Radio (CR). SS is the ability to detect the presence of a Primary User (PU) (i.e. licensed user) in order to allow a Secondary User (SU) (i.e unlicensed user) to access PU’s frequency band using CR, so that the available frequency bands can be used efficiently. We used for implementation an Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), which is the most used Software Defined Radio (SDR) device for research in wireless communications. Experimental measurements show that the Energy Detector can obtain good performances in low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) values. Furthermore, computer simulations using MATLAB are closer to those of USRP measurements.