Bayesian-based cooperative framework for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

Energy detection has been adopted as an alternative spectrum sensing method for cognitive radios due to its low computational complexity and not requiring a priori information of the signal to be detected [1]. However, different channel condition and noise power estimation in low Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), make energy detection practically challenging. To overcome these difficulties, a cooperative framework is proposed to blindly determine the occupancy of wideband channels. This framework is based on Bayesian estimation which does not need any information of noise power. The detection performances of the proposed framework is analyzed under log-normal shadow-fading channel and noise uncertainty and compared with simple energy detection. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving the probability of detection.