A Pipelined Frame Structure for cooperative spectrum sensing under bandwidth constraints

In cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS), sharing local sensing data with the fusion center (FC) incurs reporting slots, most of which are often wasted in previous studies. It is even more serious when the common control channel (CCC) is under bandwidth constraints, since the reporting slot is relatively longer. In this paper, we propose a novel frame structure for CSS to address this problem. The proposed structure, known as Pipelined Frame Structure (PFS), allocates idle reporting slots for sensing to improve the sensing accuracy. Optimal schedules of the SUs with different signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs) are investigated for two requirements, followed by the discussions about the performance gains. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed structure considerately enhances the sensing performance without any additional cooperative sensing delay overhead.