Efficient Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

Recent measurements suggest the possibility of sharing spectrum among different parties subject to interference-protection constraints. In order to enable access to an unused licensed spectrum, a secondary user has to monitor licensed bands and opportunistically transmit whenever no primary signal is detected. In this paper, we study spectrum-sharing between a primary licensee and a group of secondary users. The structure of an asymptotically optimum detector based on the measurements of all secondary users is derived and the effect of the quantization error in such a system is evaluated. The results show the superiority of the proposed detector to other schemes.