Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

On the Optimality of Equal Gain Combining for Energy Detection of Unknown Signals

Citation:   Gezici, S.; Sahinoglu, Z.; Poor, H.V., "On the Optimality of Equal Gain Combining for Energy Detection of Unknown Signals", IEEE Communications Letters, ISSN: 1089-7798, Vol. 10, Issue 11, pp. 772-774, November 2006 (IEEE Xplore)
MERL Report:  TR2006-081

In this letter, the optimality of equal gain combining (EGC) for energy detection of unknown signals in a system with receive-diversity is studied. It is shown that EGC results in an optimal test statistic for infinitesimally small signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs); however, it does not yield the optimal test for all SNR values according to the Neyman-Pearson criterion. In other words, EGC does not induce a uniformly most powerful (UMP) test for unknown signal detection.

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