Robust cooperative spectrum sensing schemes for fading channels in cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio systems, cooperative spectrum sensing can detect the presence of the primary user accurately. In practice, however, since the sensing observations are forwarded to a data collector through fading channels, the sensing performance is severely degraded. To deal with this problem, in this paper, we first propose a secondary user selection based cooperative spectrum sensing method to improve sensing performance by decreasing the reporting errors introduced by the fading channels. More specifically, only the secondary users with better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for reporting channels are allowed to send their local binary decisions (0 or 1) to the data collector while the others will send nothing. Additionally, we further propose a diversity based cooperative spectrum sensing method which applies existing space-time coding. By exploiting space diversity in CR network, the reporting errors introduced by the fading channel can be decreased and then the sensing performance is improved significantly. For either proposed cooperative spectrum sensing method, the sensing performance is derived and the analytical performance results are given. Our analysis and numerical results verify that proposed methods outperform the conventional cooperative spectrum sensing with OR-rule by taking into account the error effect on the reporting channels.