Novel scheme for cooperation spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio is a promising technology for more efficient utilization of radio spectrum. It can sense the available spectrum and use temporarily-unused licensed spectrum without interfering with primary users. Spectrum sensing performance of an individual unlicensed secondary user will be seriously degraded due to the effect of channel fading. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose an effective cooperation spectrum sensing scheme based on energy detection, which is achieved by using a selective-weighted combination of local decision statistics from cooperative secondary users. The weight allocated to each cooperative secondary user is determined through evaluating the contribution of local sensing to the final decision making. Simulation results show that the proposed cooperation scheme can provide significant performance improvements in spectrum sensing of cognitive radio networks.