Robustness of the cyclostationary detection to cyclic frequency mismatch

Cyclostationary detection is regarded as a major method for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio and other applications as well. The rationale behind the detection is that the second order statistic of the interested signal is periodical. The period is therefore used as the critical feature for detection. In practice, due to clock error or oscillator error or other errors, the detector is hardly able to know the exact period of the signal. This causes a cyclic frequency mismatch in the detection. In this paper, the origin of the mismatch and the impact of it are analyzed. Theoretic analysis and simulations are presented to show that the cyclostationary detection is actually very sensitive to the mismatch. The theoretic analysis on the test statistics matches very well with simulations and can be used for predicting the detection performances and designing the detection parameters.