Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Networks with Limited Reporting

Cooperative spectrum sensing increases the detection performance in a cognitive radio network, based on the number of sensing nodes. However, as the number of sensing nodes increases, the reporting overhead linearly increases. This paper proposes two kinds of cooperative spectrum sensing with limited reporting in a centralized cognitive radio network, a soft combination with threshold-based reporting (SC-TR) and a soft combination with contention-based reporting (SC-CR). In the proposed SC-TR scheme, each sensing node reports its sensing result to the fusion center through its own reporting channel only if the observed energy value is higher than a decision threshold. In the proposed SC-CR scheme, sensing nodes compete to report their sensing results via shared reporting channels. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes significantly reduce the reporting overhead without sacrificing the detection performance too much.