Cooperative Spectrum Sensing with Multi-channel Coordination in Cognitive Radio Networks

Accurate spectrum sensing is one of the key technologies to enable dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks. Recently cooperative spectrum sensing is proposed as an efficient way to achieve better sensing accuracy. It makes use of multiple nodes to sense a channel and then analyzes their results together to get more accurate results. Several works have been conducted to study this technology and they mostly focus on the cooperation in individual channels. However, cognitive radio networks usually deal with multiple channels, therefore the coordination among multiple channels needs be studied to fully explore the potential of cooperative sensing. In this paper we focus on the coordination among multiple channels in cooperative spectrum sensing. We at first study the theoretical improvement made by multi-channel coordination, then propose a centralized and a distributed algorithm to implement it. The theoretical analysis proves cooperative sensing can be improved significantly if the coordination among multiple channels is considered. To verify our analysis, we measure licensed channels then conduct simulations basing on collected data. The results show that the proposed algorithms can approximate optimal solution very well.