A Comparative Study on the Two Popular Cognitive Radio Spectrum Sensing Methods: Matched Filter Versus Energy Detector

In this paper, two well-known cognitive radio spectrum sensing (CR-SS) methods, energy detection (ED) and matched filter (MF), are numerically realized in time domain (TD) as well as frequency domain (FD). Simulations for both ED and MF methods demonstrate the similar results (probability of detection) in the similar conditions for TD and FD versions of each method. In contrast, the required processing time (or equally computational complexity) for TD realization of each method is higher than that for FD realization. In addition, the running time of MF is higher than that for the ED. Furthermore, in similar conditions, the false alarm rate for MF method is less than that for the ED which means higher accuracy for the MF method compared to the ED. Moreover, it is observed that the ED is more sensitive to threshold and in a small range of threshold, detection values will be changed, sharply. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that signal to noise ratio (SNR) has direct effect on the receiver operating characteristic (ROC), especially for the ED method.