Performance evaluation of cooperative sensing via IEEE 802.15.4 radio

Spectrum Sensing is one of the important tasks for the wireless devices but due to fading, shadowing and noise the performance of individual spectrum sensing devices is not ideal. Cooperative Sensing is seen as a way to improve the performance of individual spectrum sensing devices resultantly improving the efficient utilization of radio bandwidth and minimizing the interference among wireless devices. State of the art are extensive simulations and analysis on cooperative sensing although there are also number of performance evaluations of various fusion rules of cooperative sensing using software defined radios and FPGAs. The limitation of previous work is that they do not address the question how we can improve the overall performance of real systems with cooperative sensing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental work which presents cooperative sensing protocols with standard radios and evaluates the system performance using cooperative sensing. With IEEE 802.15.4 equipped radio devices we model primary, secondary and cooperating users. We implement cooperative sensing protocols, setup a scenario, perform measurements and compare system performance with and without cooperative sensing. All the experiments are automated with the wisebed testbed software. The evaluation results of cooperative sensing protocols indicate new challenges for optimization and provide awareness to the problem of improving the overall system performance.