Efficient Fusion of Spectrum Sensing Information under Parameter Uncertainty and Impulsive Noise

This paper addresses the performance of an efficient fusion scheme for cooperative spectrum sensing in the context of cognitive radio systems. The secondary users' decisions are transmitted to the fusion center at the same time and using the same carrier frequency, thus saving bandwidth and time resources of the report channel. The report channel state information and the receiver thermal noise variance are the main parameters used by the decision rule at the fusion center to determine whether the primary signal is present or absent. The global spectrum sensing performance is reported in this paper when the fusion center receiver is subjected to impulsive noise and uncertainty in the estimation of the above parameters. It is demonstrated that the receiver is quite robust against noise variance uncertainty and impulsive noise, whereas its performance may be severely degraded due to channel state information uncertainty.