Improved Collaborative Spectrum Sensing Scheme for Maritime Cognitive Radio

Expeditious growth in wireless networks for numerous wireless services and applications lead to the increase in demand for radio spectrum in both terrestrial and marine wireless communications. Radio spectrum is scarce as the available spectrum is already been allocated to various applications. Cognitive radio technology is an optimistic solution for the spectral scarcity. In Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN), the unused licensed bands are dynamically accessed by the unlicensed secondary users for data transmission. Spectrum Sensing (SS) is the key technique to detect the presence or absence of the primary users. SS for terrestrial wireless communication have been studied vastly. This paper is aimed to study SS for Maritime Cognitive Radio Networks (MCRN) which is daunting as SS in MCRN depends on the sea state. Existing work on SS in MCRN deals with Classical Energy Detection (CED) which is a straight forward procedure with low complexity and can be applied generally to any signal irrespective of its format. Here we intend to perform SS in MCRN using Improved Energy Detection (IED) which surpasses the performance of CED without ruining its general attributes. Evaluations and analysis are carried out using detection probability performance metric for both CED and IED, simulated and compared for different sea states.