A Communication-overhead-aware cooperative spectrum sensing scheme in cognitive radio networks

Spectrum sensing plays an important role in cognitive radio networks. Since single user spectrum sensing is subjected to destructive effect of shadowing and fading, cooperative spectrum sensing is proposed to resolve the problem. However, the cooperation introduces additional communication overhead. In this paper, we propose a communication overhead aware cooperative strategy for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In our proposed strategy, a smoothing factor is introduced to control the information exchange between CR users and fusion center in order to reduce the communication overhead as well as guarantee the detection performance of the cooperative spectrum sensing scheme. Simulation results show that compared with traditional cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, our proposed communication overhead aware cooperative spectrum sensing scheme can save more communication overhead obviously with almost same detection performance.