SNR Walls for Signal Detection
Top Cited Papers
- 15 February 2008
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing
- Vol. 2 (1), 4-17
- https://doi.org/10.1109/jstsp.2007.914879
Abstract
This paper considers the detection of the presence/absence of signals in uncertain low SNR environments. Small modeling uncertainties are unavoidable in any practical system and so robustness to them is a fundamental performance metric. The impact of these modeling uncertainties can be quantified by the position of the "SNR wall" below which a detector will fail to be robust, no matter how long it can observe the channel. We propose simple mathematical models for the uncertainty in the noise and fading processes. These are used to show what aspects of the model lead to SNR walls for differing levels of knowledge of the signal to be detected. These results have implications for wireless spectrum regulators. The context is opportunistically sharing spectrum with primary users that must be detected in order to avoid causing harmful interference on a channel. Ideally, a secondary system would be able to detect primaries robustly without having to know much about their signaling strategies. We argue that the tension between primary and secondary users is captured by the technical question of computing the optimal tradeoff between the primary user's capacity and the secondary user's sensing robustness as quantified by the SNR wall. This is an open problem, but we compute this tradeoff for some simple detectors.Keywords
This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit:
- SNR Walls for Feature DetectorsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2007
- On the Need for Knowledge of the Phase in Exploiting Known Primary TransmissionsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2007
- Achievable rates in cognitive radio channelsIEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2006
- Cooperative Sensing among Cognitive RadiosPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2006
- Experimental study of spectrum sensing based on energy detection and network cooperationPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2006
- Power Scaling for Cognitive RadioPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2005
- Radiometric detection of spread-spectrum signals in noise of uncertain powerIEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, 1992
- Signal interception: a unifying theoretical framework for feature detectionIEEE Transactions on Communications, 1988
- Robust StatisticsWiley Series in Probability and Statistics, 1981
- A Robust Version of the Probability Ratio TestThe Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 1965