Collaborative Sensing using Confidence Vector in IEEE 802.22 WRAN System

For operation of IEEE 802.22 WRAN system, spectrum sensing is a essential function. However, due to strict sensing requirement of WRAN system, spectrum sensing process of CR nodes require long quiet period. In addition, CR nodes sometimes fail to detect licensed users due to shadowing effect of wireless communication environment. To overcome this problem, CR nodes collaborate with each other for increasing the sensing reliability or mitigating the sensitivity requirement. A general approach for decision fusion, the "k out of N" rule is often taken as the decision fusion rule for its simplicity. However, since k out of N rules can not achieve better performance than the highest SNR node when SNR is largely different among CR nodes, the local SNR of each node should be considered to achieve better performance. In this paper, we propose two novel data fusion methods by utilizing confidence vector which represents the confidence level of individual sensing result. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes improve the signal detection performance than the conventional data fusion algorithms