Scalable and Robust ANN Based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio network (CRN) supports dynamic spectrum access addressing spectrum scarcity issue experienced by today’s wireless communication network. Sensing is an important task and cooperative spectrum sensing is used for improving detection performance of spectrum. The sensing information from individual secondary users is sent to fusion center to infer a common global decision regarding primary user’s presence. Various fusion schemes for decision making are proposed in the literature but they lack scalability and robustness. We have introduced artificial neural network (ANN) at fusion center thereby achieving significant improvement in detection performance and reduction in false alarm rate as compared to conventional schemes. The proposed ANN scheme is found capable to deal with scalability of CRN with consistent performance. Further, SNR of individual Secondary user is taken into consideration in decision making at fusion center. Moreover the proposed scheme is tested against security attack (malicious users) and inadvertent errors occurring at SUs are found to be robust.