Performance Tradeoff for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio networks, multiple cognitive radio nodes perform spectrum sensing cooperatively in order to detect the primary user more accurately. Previous works on cooperative spectrum sensing have shown that the detection performance can be improved through increasing either the observation interval or the number of the sensing nodes. However, increasing the observation interval will result in the reduction of transmit efficiency and the agility of cognitive users, and at the same time increasing the number of sensing nodes may lead to the overhead increase of control channel and computational complexity. In this paper, we formulate the tradeoff relation between the observation interval and the number of the sensing nodes under the constraint of required detection performance. The numerical results show the proposed relation.