ORIGINAL RESEARCH Sensing performance of energy detector in cognitive radio networks Samit Kumar Ghosh 1 • Jishan Mehedi 2 • Umesh Chandra Samal 3 Received: 8 September 2017 / Accepted: 11 August 2018 Ó Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Computer Applications and Management 2018 Abstract In order to increase the spectral efﬁciency of any communication systems, spectrum sensing techniques may be used for proﬁcient utilization of inadequate spectrum resources. It identiﬁes the unused spectrum holes, which is originally assigned to the primary users (PU). These spectrum holes are then assigned to the secondary or cognitive users with avoiding interference to the primary users. In this paper, a spectrum assignment technique based on energy detection technique is proposed. This enhanced energy detection technique works well at low signal-to- noise ratio (SNR), which makes the communication system more power efﬁcient and can be for low power applica- tions. Further, the performance of the proposed spectrum sensing method is examined for cognitive radio (CR) net- work. The performance of the proposed method is also examined by calculating the probability of detection, probability of false alarm and error probability in presence of additive Gaussian noise and the effect of different sensing parameters on the probability of error in detecting primary users are also evaluated. Keywords Cognitive radio networks  Energy detection  Spectrum sensing  Probability of detection 1 Introduction Intelligent channel sensing forms the crucial technique towards the advancement of cognitive radio technology. Cognitive radios employment on proﬁcient sensing algo- rithms to ﬁnd the white spaces in the primary (licensed) user band and utilize them to transmit their own data [1]. This paper focuses on the different detection techniques which can be used to identify the unused spectrum holes. The identiﬁcation and assignment of the unused spectrum holes to the secondary users are very important factor of the CR scenarios. In order to keep the primary users (PUs) from the undeserved interference the detection technique must work for low SNR in CR scenarios. Therefore, the prime objective is to propose detection algorithms which can perform well at low SNR with avoiding interference to the PUs. Different existing spectrum sensing (SS) algo- rithms for the detection of spectrum hole have been come up with their own advantages and limitations in context to CR applications. Most of the methods are based on energy detection (ED) methods are described in [2], matched ﬁl- tering method in [3], feature detection algorithms discussed in [4] and eigenvalue-based detection for spectrum sensing discussed [5]. An evaluation of various spectrum sensing methodologies for Cognitive Radio are demonstrated in [6]. An exceptional range detecting execution can be achieved by feature detection algorithms with exploiting some known characteristics of the primary user (PU) sig- nals. However, it requires long time for detecting. More- over, Matched Filtering is accepted to perform at its best with high handling pick up at the imperative of knowing & Samit Kumar Ghosh samitnitrkl@gmail.com Jishan Mehedi j.mehedi@gmail.com Umesh Chandra Samal samal.umesh@gmail.com 1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India 2 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College, Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, India 3 School of Electronics Engineering, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, India 123 Int. j. inf. tecnol. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-018-0236-7