Feasibility of energy detection for dynamic spectrum access

In the Adaptive Ad-hoc Free band Wireless communications (AAF) project, a radio system is investigated that senses its environment to detect un-utilised radio spectrum and use it for ad-hoc networking. In this paper the performance in terms of Quality of Detection (QoD) of a simple energy detection system is studied. It is shown that noise-level uncertainty poses a hard limit on the detectability of signals. In the case that sub-noise signal detection is required, a noise-level measurement function may have to be included in the system architecture