Cooperative spectrum sensing with secondary user selection for cognitive radio networks over Nakagami-m fading channels

This study investigates cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) in cognitive wireless radio networks (CWRNs). A practical system is considered where all channels experience Nakagami-m fading and suffers from background noise. The realisation of the CSS can follow two approaches where the final spectrum decision is based on either only the global decision at fusion centre (FC) or both decisions from the FC and secondary user (SU). By deriving closed-form expressions and bounds of missed detection probability (MDP) and false alarm probability (FAP), the authors are able to not only demonstrate the impacts of the m-parameter on the sensing performance, but also evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the two CSS schemes with respect to various fading parameters and the number of SUs. It is interestingly noticed that a smaller number of SUs could be selected to achieve the lower bound of the MDP rather using all the available SUs while still maintaining a low FAP. As a second contribution, they propose a SU selection algorithm for the CSS to find the optimised number of SUs for lower complexity and reduced power consumption. Finally, numerical results are provided to demonstrate the findings.