Oceanic microwave remote sensing provides the data necessary for the estimation of significant geophysical parameters such as the near-surface vector wind. To obtain accurate estimates, a precise understanding of the measurements is critical. This work clarifies and quantifies specific uncertainties in the scattered power measured by an active radar instrument. While there are many sources of uncertainty in remote sensing measurements, this work concentrates on three significant, yet largely unstudied effects. With a theoretical derivation of the backscatter from an ocean-like surface, results from this dissertation demonstrate that the backscatter decays with surface roughness with two distinct modes of behavior, affected by the size of the footprint. A technique is developed and scatterometer data analyzed to quantify the variability of spaceborne backscatter measurements for given wind conditions; the impact on wind retrieval is described in terms of bias and the Cramer-Rao lower bound. The probability density function of modified periodogram averages (a spectral estimation technique) is derived in generality and for the specific case of power estimates made by the NASA scatterometer. The impact on wind retrieval is quantified.

Cognitive radio is a technology that aims to maximize the current usage of the licensed frequency spectrum. Cognitive radio aims to provide services for license-exempt users by making use of dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and opportunistic spectrum sharing strategies (OSS). Cognitive radios are defined as intelligent wireless devices capable of adapting their communication parameters in order to operate within underutilized bands while avoiding causing interference to licensed users. An underused band of frequencies in a specific location or time is known as a spectrum hole. Therefore, in order to locate spectrum holes, reliable spectrum sensing algorithms are crucial to facilitate the evolution of cognitive radio networks. Since a large and growing body of literature has mainly focused into the conventional time domain (TD) energy detector, throughout this thesis the problem of spectrum sensing is investigated within the context of a frequency domain (FD) approach. The purpose of this study is to investigate detection based on methods of nonparametric power spectrum estimation. The considered methods are the periodogram, Bartlett's method, Welch overlapped segments averaging (WOSA) and the Multitaper estimator (MTE). Another major motivation is that the MTE is strongly recommended for the application of cognitive radios. This study aims to derive the detector performance measures for each case. Another aim is to investigate and highlight the main differences between the TD and the FD approaches. The performance is addressed for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh channels and the general Rician and Nakagami fading channels. For each of the investigated detectors, the analytical models are obtained by studying the characteristics of the Hermitian quadratic form representation of the decision statistic and the matrix of the Hermitian form is identified. The results of the study have revealed the high accuracy of the derived mathematical models. Moreover, it is found that the TD detector differs from the FD detector in a number of aspects. One principal and generalized conclusion is that all the investigated FD methods provide a reduced probability of false alarm when compared with the TD detector. Also, for the case of periodogram, the probability of sensing errors is independent of the length of observations, whereas in time domain the probability of false alarm is increased when the sample size increases. The probability of false alarm is further reduced when diversity reception is employed. Furthermore, compared to the periodogram, both Bartlett method and Welch method provide better performance in terms of lower probability of false alarm but an increased probability of detection for a given probability of false alarm. Also, the performance of both Bartlett's method and WOSA is sensitive to the number of segments, whereas WOSA is also sensitive to the overlapping factor. Finally, the performance of the MTE is dependent on the number of employed discrete prolate spheroidal (Slepian) sequences, and the MTE outperforms the periodogram, Bartlett's method and WOSA, as it provides the minimal probability of false alarm.