Maximizing communication opportunity for collaborative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio networks, secondary users (SUs) must accurately sense the spectrum of primary user (PU) to acquire their own communication opportunities without interfering PU's communication. Collaborative spectrum sensing (CSS) among SUs can improve the probability to detect PU's communication, compared to non-collaborative spectrum sensing, where each SU senses signal independently. In this paper, we propose a communication opportunity maximization scheme for CSS in multiple PUs cognitive radio networks. First, we define an objective function that represents SU's communication opportunity and a constraint on miss detection probability. In the proposed scheme, each SU forms a group with other SUs to meet the constraint and maximize its own communication opportunity according to the objective function and the constraint. Through simulation experiments with a two-PU scenario, we show that the proposed scheme can improve the ratio of winning SUs, that can use PU's channel, to the whole SUs, in comparison with the non-collaborative spectrum sensing. We also show that it can quickly increase the overall throughput of winning SUs up to the theoretical upper bound.