Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Using Bayesian Updating with Multiple Observations

We study cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio (CR) networks using the hidden Markov model (HMM) for opportunistic spectrum access (OSA). We assume that the primary channel operates in a time division multiple address (TDMA) manner. Thus, spectrum sensing is operating in a slot-by-slot basis. In contrast to the conventional Bayesian updating using only one observation, in this work, we propose to perform the update in a concatenated fashion with all the observations available from the secondary users (SUs). In the proposed scheme, a predefined threshold on the belief is used for determining the channel activity. With the threshold, the proposed scheme is more flexible in the system operation than the simple majority vote scheme, in which no such threshold is available. We compare, by simulations, the performance of the proposed concatenated update scheme with that of the majority vote scheme and show that the probabilities of correctly detecting a busy state and an idle state are about 1 as the number of SUs is as large as 15, so the effects of the further increase in the number of SUs are limited.