Cooperative spectrum sensing using amplify-and-forward relaying with partial relay selection in cognitive radio networks

Cooperative spectrum sensing has been shown to be an effective approach to improve the detection performance by exploiting the spatial diversity among multiple cognitive nodes. By using the amplify-and-forward relaying with partial relay selection, this paper proposes a novel cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, which provides higher detection performance and is interesting in distributed cognitive radio networks. In the proposed sensing scheme, the “best” cognitive relay by means of partial relay selection technique amplifies and forwards the signals transmitted from the primary user (PU) to the cognitive user (CU). Then the CU detects PU’s states (i.e., presence or absence) via an energy detector. Moreover, the average missed-detection probability of proposed sensing scheme is studied over Nakagami-m fading channels, where m is a positive integer. In particular, the tight closed-form lower bounds of the average missed-detection probability are presented for the convenience of performance evaluation in practice. Finally, numerical results are provided to validate the derived closed-form lower bounds and the influence of the number of cognitive relays on the detection performance is also discussed.