Wideband spectrum sensing for cognitive radio: a model order selection approach

Wideband spectrum sensing (SS) allows cognitive radios (CRs) to reach, by monitoring large portions of spectrum, a better awareness of the surrounding radio environment. In this paper, we formulate wideband SS as a model order selection problem. This approach consists in the adoption of information theoretic criteria (ITC) to identify the occupied frequency components in a frequency domain representation of the observed signal. We provide a general formulation of the problem and then focus on the case in which discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is used as spectral representation. Finally, we propose consistent ITC for which we provide analytical expressions for the maximum probability of detection.