Improved parameter estimation with threshold adaptation of cognitive local sensors

Reliable detection of primary user activity increases the opportunity to access temporarily unused bands and prevents harmful interference to the primary system. By extracting a global decision from local sensing results, cooperative sensing achieves high reliability against multipath fading. For the effective combining of sensing results, which is generalized by a likelihood ratio test, the fusion center should learn some parameters, such as the probabilities of primary transmission, false alarm, and detection at the local sensors. During the training period in supervised learning, the on/off log of primary transmission serves as the output label of decision statistics from the local sensor. In this paper, we extend unsupervised learning techniques with an expectation maximization algorithm for cooperative spectrum sensing, which does not require an external primary transmission log. Local sensors report binary hard decisions to the fusion center and adjust their operating points to enhance learning performance. Increasing the number of sensors, the joint-expectation step makes a confident classification on the primary transmission as in the supervised learning. Thereby, the proposed scheme provides accurate parameter estimates and a fast convergence rate even in low signal-to-noise ratio regimes, where the primary signal is dominated by the noise at the local sensors.