The need to make better use of the radio spectrum is leading to the development of new spectrum access strategies. Among these strategies, the opportunistic spectrum access based on the Cognitive Radio concepts allows the sharing of a spectral bandwidth between two categories of users: Primary User “PU” and Secondary User “SU”. PU holds the license to exploit the bandwidth and SU is an opportunistic user willing to use the channel when the PU is idle. One of the most crucial challenge for SU is the identification of a free bandwidth by conducting a spectrum sensing [
1,
2]. Many reliable spectrum sensing methods have been eveloped to help the SU to limit their interference to PU’s transmission [
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11]. Among spectrum sensing approaches, we can mention the Waveform Detection (WFD) [
12], the Cyclostationary Features based Detection (CFD)[
13] and the Energy based Detection (ED) [
14,
15]. One of the most reliable methods, WFD, requires a prior knowledge on the PU’s signal characteristics. Based on the cyclic spectrum estimation, the CFD requires a relatively high computational cost for a high frequency resolution. The ED is the simplest detection method, but it is unable to distinguish a communication signal from an energetic noise, when the noise is not a weak sense stationary stochastic process or the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is very low. Recently, spectrum sensing algorirthms, based on the promising concept of machine or deep learning, have been proposed [
16,
17,
18,
19]. However, these algorithms do not perform well in a non-cooperative context and at a low SNR (SNR ≤ -3 dB) and require a huge database to be optimized. To overcome these issues, we developped a blind strategy based on the Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) of the received signal [
20]. The quantification analysis of this recurrence can be used to find out some intrinsic features of a dynamic system, such as: hidden periodicities, stationarity features or linearity properties. Due to modulation standards, transmitted signals may contain hidden periodicities. Using this fact, we use Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) tools to detect if the bandwidth allocated to PU is available or not. The main RQA tool used to quantify the recurrence level is the Recurrence Rate (RR) considered as the probability of having recurring states in a signal. In a recent work, we have proposed the RR based Detector (RRD) [
20]. However, RRD is very sensitive to the SNR and depends on the choice of a recurrence threshold. To overcome the RRD limits, we propose in this paper an efficient algorithm called Recurrence Analysis based Detector (RAD). RAD exploits the similitude of distances among various states of the signal in a multidimensional space. This similitude of distances is evaluated by a square symmetrical matrix named the distance matrix. Using symmetrical property, we only exploit the upper triangular part of this matrix in order to reduce considerably the computational cost of the RAD. Then, we show that for a White Gaussian Noise (WGN), the coefficients of the first top diagonal of the distance matrix becomes a representative sample of all other coefficients. This is not the case for a communication signal even with a small SNR. This new approach can detect a communication signal in a very low SNR. We have analytically established the probabilities of detection
and false alarm
. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we studied the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves of RAD. The theoretical and experimental results show the ability of RAD to detect the presence of a communication signal as soon as the SNR is greater than
dB with a very low probability of false alarm.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 presents the problem of spectrum sensing and our motivation for RQA.
Section 3 deals with the concepts of RQA and the state of the art in the determination of embedding parameters in order to exhibit the hidden recurrences.
Section 4 and
Section 5 present the Recurrence Analysis based detection model and its theoretical and experimental performance. The last section contains the conclusion and perspectives.