Optimal Utility of Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for CUAVNs

With the increasing demands of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is an emerging technology that identifies the unused spectrum for cognitive UAV networks (CUAVNs). However, different from traditional single-slot CSS (SCSS) among multiple independent spectrum sensing nodes, realizing CSS will become a difficult task because of the UAV's location flexibility, the sensing time is limited in particular. For this aim, we formulate a multi-slot CSS (MCSS) among multiple mini-slots of a UAV sensing node to accomplish cooperation in this paper. In order for guaranteeing the achievable throughput of CUAVNs, we make use of the sequential idea to proceed with MCSS within the sensing time constraint. Furthermore, we make an in-depth investigation on the performance, cost and benefit for MCSS. On basis of these analyses, we conduct a utility function to optimize the UAV's utility. Finally, numerical simulation results show that our proposed MSCS is superior than the traditional SCSS, in terms of the CSS performance and utility.