Throughput Analysis in Cooperative Sensing Networks over Imperfect Reporting Channel

Spectrum sensing is an essential functionality that enables cognitive radios (CR) to detect spectral holes and to opportunistically use under-utilized frequency bands without causing harmful interference to primary users. In this paper, we study the fundamental tradeoff between sensing capability and achievable throughput of CR users. By assuming the reporting channel is a binary symmetric channel (BSC) with an error probability P_e,i, the problem of throughput tradeoff is investigated and the relationship between the throughput, the sensing time and the number of cognitive radios is researched. By simulation we can know that the throughput becomes a single peak function with the increasing number of cognitive radios and that the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing is limited by the probability of reporting errors.