Improved Detection Performance of Energy Detector by Optimization of Threshold Using BPSO Algorithm for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) offers solution to effectively utilize the unused portions of the licensed spectrum by secondary users (SU) on a condition that it will not cause any harmful or no interference to primary users (PU). Spectrum sensing has been identified as a key enabling technique to ensure that SU will not interfere with PU activities. For CR technology, there exist different types of detectors. Energy detector (ED) is one among them as it is easy to implement. The determination of threshold value for an ED which gives the lowest probability of sensing error (i.e., probability of false alarm and probability of miss-detection) in CR still remained an open issue till now. In this paper, we have proposed Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) algorithm for the optimization of threshold value of ED which satisfies the lowest sensing error criterion and enhance the detection performance of ED. Our MATLAB simulations show the validity of our proposed algorithm.