Performance of cooperative spectrum sensing in fading channels

Detection is compromised when a cognitive radio (CR) user experiences deep shadowing or fading effects. In order to detect the primary user (PU) more accurately, we allow the CR users to cooperate by sharing their information. In this paper we investigate performance of cooperative spectrum sensing scheme using energy detection (ED-CSS) to improve the sensing performance in channels such as log-normal shadowing and Nakagami fading channels. Hard decision combining rule (OR-rule, AND-rule and MAJORITY-rule) is performed at fusion center (FC) to make the final decision about primary user present or not. Comparison among data fusion rules has been investigated for a wide range of average SNR values. The performance has been assessed in terms of miss detection (P_m) and false detection probabilities (P_f). A simulation model has been developed to evaluate performance of ED-CSS in different fading environments. A comparative performance of ED-CSS has been studied for various data fusion rules in Nakagami fading as well as shadow faded channels.