Belief Propagation Based Spectrum Sensing Subject to Dynamic Primary User Activities: Phantom of Quickest Detection

Cognitive radio is one of the enabling technologies considered for the next generation communications systems for many mission-critical applications, such as in the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program and the DARPA xG program. In cognitive radio systems, cooperative spectrum sensing is one of the key techniques that can improve the reliability and agility. In this study, a framework integrating quickest detection with belief propagation (BP) is applied to the scenario of temporally and spatially varying primary user activities. Using numerical simulations, system performance measured by false alarm (FA) rate, missed detection (MD) rate and average detection delay is obtained for different setups. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves better detection error rate and detection delay tradeoff.