Communication-oriented cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio

Cooperative spectrum sensing improves detection performance over fading and shadowing channels by using multiple cognitive radio (CR) users. Compared with local spectrum sensing with individual CR user, it can either reduce sensitivity requirements for each CR user or shorten the overall sensing duration. These advantages are from spatial diversity when all cooperative users sense a common primary user. However, in practice, CR users at different locations may receive signals from different primary users, which may confuse the fusion user and result in the loss of communication opportunities. In this paper, we propose a cooperative sensing approach by taking the reliability of each partner user into account. Simulation results illustrate significant performance improvement of the proposed approach.