Cooperative spectrum sensing with realistic reporting channel

In cooperative spectrum sensing, each cognitive radio (CR) user needs to report its local sensing results to a common CR user for a final decision. Most of existing contributions assume that such a reporting is perfect, i.e., there always exists an idle channel to accomplish an error free reporting. However, it is not true in practice since the reporting actually belongs to secondary transmission and may cause interference to primary users. In this paper, we propose a practical reporting approach in cooperative spectrum sensing, called "Listen-Before-Reporting", which considers both the availability and the reliability of the reporting channels. We design the detectors at the FC in both single and multiple realistic reporting bands. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs fairly well under imperfect reporting channels.