An energy-efficient cooperative spectrum sensing scheme for cognitive radio networks

Rapidly rising energy costs and increasingly rigid environmental standards have led to an emerging trend of addressing “energy efficiency” aspect of wireless communication technologies. Cognitive radio can play an important role in improving energy efficiency in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and time-saving one-bit cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, which has two stages. If the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is high or no primary user exists, only one stage of coarse spectrum sensing is needed, by which the sensing time and energy are saved. Otherwise, the second stage of fine spectrum sensing will be performed to increase the spectrum sensing accuracy. Furthermore, only one-bit decision is sent by each secondary user to minimize the overhead. Plenty of simulation is performed, and the results show that the sensing time and energy consumption are both reduced significantly in the proposed scheme.