Abstract:Compressive spectrum sensing (CSS) has been widely studied in wideband cognitive radios, benefiting from the reduction of sampling rate via compressive sensing (CS) technology. However, the sensing performance of most existing CSS excessively relies on the prior information such as spectrum sparsity or noise variance. Thus, a key challenge in practical CSS is how to work effectively even in the absence of such information. In this paper, we propose a blind orthogonal least squares based CSS algorithm (B-OLS-CSS), which functions properly without the requirement of prior information. Specifically, we develop a novel blind stopping rule for the OLS algorithm based on its probabilistic recovery condition. This innovative rule gets rid of the need of the spectrum sparsity or noise information, but only requires the computational-feasible mutual incoherence property of the given measurement matrix. Our theoretical analysis indicates that the signal-to-noise ratio required by the proposed B-OLS-CSS for achieving a certain sensing accuracy is relaxed than that by the benchmark CSS using the OMP algorithm, which is verified by extensive simulation results.