An energy-difference detection based spectrum sensing technique for improving the spectral efficiency of LDACS1 in aeronautical communications

European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL) has proposed to use the part of L-band for future Air-to-Ground (A/G) communications. Two technology options are available for the proposed L-band digital aeronautical communication system (LDACS); LDACS1 and LDACS2. LDACS1 is considered as the most promising and matured candidate for future A/G communications. There is an agreement on European level to only consider LDACS1 further and LADCS1 is also referred to as LDACS. The efficiency of LDACS1 can be increased by the dynamic allocation of spectrum in an opportunistic fashion, which would require spectrum sensing to detect available frequency bands. In this paper, we propose an energy-difference detection based spectrum sensing scheme for cognitive radio enabled LDACS1 system. A mathematical formulation for the probability of detection, the probability of false alarm and the decision threshold in Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel are derived for the proposed scheme. Simulation study shows that the proposed energy-difference detection based sensing scheme offers an improved detection performance than the conventional energy detection method at the low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) scenarios and identical performance at relatively high SNRs.