Cognitive radio (CR) is an integral system in telecommunications technology that gives unlicensed users access to licensed spectrums via dynamic spectrum access (DSA), to promote spectral efficiency. A significant operation in cognitive radio system is spectrum sensing. This paper evaluates and compares two of the major non-cooperative sensing techniques (energy and cyclostationary feature detector (CFD)) in order, to determine which gives better performance. Matlab Simulink was used as modeling and simulating tool for the evaluations. From the results, energy detector was simpler and faster but unlike CFD exhibited poor performance in corrupt channels.
