Energy detection of DVB-T signals against noise uncertainty

In this letter, we consider the spectrum sensing of digital video broadcasting-terrestrial (DVB-T) signals with energy detection (ED). ED delivers a superior performance among low computational complexity detectors, but it is vulnerable to noise uncertainty. By exploiting the pilot periodicity in DVB-T signals, we propose a low complexity noise power estimator which works in multipath channels, and does not require time and frequency synchronization. Simulations show that, with the noise power estimator, ED significantly outperforms the pilot correlation-based detection which is often used in DVB-T spectrum sensing.