Robust joint interference detection and decoding for OFDM-based cognitive radio systems with unknown interference

Cognitive radio technology facilitates spectrum reuse and alleviates spectrum crunch. One fundamental problem in cognitive radio is to avoid the interference caused by other communication systems sharing the same frequency band. However, spectrum sensing cannot guarantee accurate detection of the interference in many practical situations. Hence, it is crucial to design robust receivers to combat the in-band interference. In this paper, we first present a simple pilot aided interference detection method. To combat the residual interference that cannot be detected by the interference detector, we further propose a robust joint interference detection and decoding scheme. By exploiting the code structure in interference detection, the proposed scheme can successfully detect most of the interfered symbols without requiring the knowledge of the interference distribution. Our simulation results show that, even without any prior knowledge of the interference distribution, the proposed joint interference detection and decoding scheme is able to achieve a performance close to that of the maximum likelihood decoder with the full knowledge of the interference distribution.