Vasicek and Van Es entropy-based spectrum sensing for cognitive radios

Accurate detection of spectrum holes is a useful requirement for cognitive radios that improves the efficiency of spectrum usage. The authors propose three novel, simple, and entropy-based detectors for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio. The authors evaluate the probability of detection of these three detectors: Vasicek's entropy detector, truncated Vasicek's entropy detector, and Van Es' entropy detector, over a predefined probability of false-alarm. In particular, the authors provide the approximate and asymptotic test statistics for these detectors in the presence and absence of Nakagami-m fading, noise variance uncertainty, and optimised detection threshold. Furthermore, the authors provide a detailed comparison study among all the detectors via Monte Carlo simulations and justify authors results through real-world data. The authors’ experimental results establish a superior performance of truncated Vasicek's entropy detector over Vasicek's entropy detector, energy detector, differential entropy detector and Van Es' entropy detector in practically viable scenarios.