In this paper, a signal detection scheme for cognitive radio (CR) based on the Bussgang theorem is proposed. The proposed scheme calculates the statistical difference between Gaussian noise and the primary user signal by applying the Bussgang theorem to the received signal. Therefore, the proposed scheme overcomes the noise uncertainty and gives scalable complexity according to the zero-memory nonlinear function for a mobile device. We also present the theoretical analysis on the detection threshold and the detection performance in the additive white Gaussian noise channel. The proposed detection scheme is evaluated by computer simulations based on the IEEE 802.22 standard for the wireless regional area network. Our results show that the proposed scheme is robust to the noise uncertainty and works well in a very low signal-to-noise ratio.