Data fusion schemes for cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

Cooperative spectrum sensing has proven its efficiency to detect spectrum holes in cognitive radio network (CRN) by combining sensing information of multiple cognitive radio users. In this paper, we study different fusion schemes that can be implemented in fusion center. Simulation comparison between these schemes based on hard, quantized and soft fusion rules are conducted. It is shown through computer simulation that the soft combination scheme outperforms the hard one at the cost of more complexity; the quantized combination scheme provides a good tradeoff between detection performance and complexity. In the paper, we also analyze a quantized combination scheme based on a tree-bit quantization and compare its performance with some hard and soft combination schemes.