Improved Sensing Accuracy using Enhanced Energy Detection Algorithm with Secondary User Cooperation in Cognitive Radios

Spectrum sensing is indispensable for cognitive radio to identify the available white spaces. Energy detection is considered as a preferred technique for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks. It is because of its simplicity, applicability and low computational complexity, energy detection is employed widely for spectrum sensing. This paper proposes an enhanced energy detection based spectrum sensing algorithm which incorporates the features of traditional energy detection and cooperative detection. The false alarm and detection probabilities of the proposed algorithm are derived theoretically under AWGN channel conditions. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated analytically for various decision thresholds. The performance evaluations indicate that the proposed enhanced energy detection algorithm outshines the traditional energy detection algorithm and greatly improves the spectrum sensing accuracy under varying SNR conditions.