Performance limitations for cooperative spectrum sensing with reporting channel errors

The main focus of this paper is on the performance limitations for cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radios caused by the reporting channel errors. In this paper, we consider hard decision (HD) based cooperative sensing (CS), where each secondary user (SU) detecting a primary user (PU) sends a one-bit local decision to the fusion center (FC). The reporting channel errors may cause bit errors which may be non-identically distributed. The effect of reporting channel errors is incorporated in the analysis through Bit Error Probability (BEP). The detection performance at the fusion center is studied for the counting rule or K-out-of-N fusion rule using analytical tools and simulations. For CS, a BEP wall exists under the imposed constraints on the false alarm probability and missed detection probability. In this paper, we specifically study the BEP wall phenomenon for the counting rule in a general scenario, where the reporting channels are independent but may or may not be identically distributed.