Performance Analysis of Relay-Based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks Over Non-Identical Nakagami-m Channels

This paper provides performance analysis of relay-based cognitive radio (CR) networks and presents a detect-amplify-and-forward (DAF) relaying strategy for cooperative spectrum sensing over non-identical Nakagami-m fading channels. An advanced statistical approach is introduced to derive new exact closed-form expressions for average false alarm probability and average detection probability. We also introduce a novel approximation to alleviate the computational complexity of the proposed models. This paper points out the inconsistency of several assumptions that are typically used for performance analysis of CR networks and reveals that channel fading on the relaying links yields similar performance degradations as on the sensing channel. The study also shows that it is not necessary to incorporate all CRs in the cooperative process and that a small number of reliable radios are enough to achieve practical detection level. Compared with the amplify-and-forward strategy, refraining the heavily faded relays in the DAF strategy improves the detection accuracy and reduces the bandwidth requirement of the relaying links. The presented analysis could lead to intuitive system design guidelines for CR networks impaired with non-identical faded channels.