Cooperative Spectrum Sensing with Dynamic Threshold Adaptation

Spectrum sensing is a key enabling technology of cognitive radio. Reliable detection increases access opportunity to temporarily unused bands and prevents harmful interference to the licensed users. Due to the receiver noise, signal attenuation, and multi-path fading effect, however, it is usually not possible to determine the existence of primary signal with absolute certainty. By extracting a global decision from shared local sensing results, cooperative sensing achieves high reliability over fading channels. In this paper, we assume that the traffic statistic of primary system is logged into the radio environment map (REM) and can be accessed by the secondary systems. The threshold of each energy detector is dynamically adapted according to the utility values and a priori information from REM. Then, decision results and corresponding operating points are collected by a fusion center, which makes a global decision with high confidence.