An Innovative Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Algorithm with Non-ideal Feedback Channels and Delay Considerations

Cognitive radio (CR) is used to overcome the spectrum scarcity problem, which results from fixed allocation of wireless bands. CR allows the unlicensed secondary users to exploit the idle spectrum, which is not occupied by any licensed primary user (PU), thus increasing the overall spectrum utilization. In this paper, we first propose a simple cooperative sensing algorithm, which combines the local decision at each CR along with a group decision received from a fusion center to produce a collective decision on the existence of the PU. The performance of the algorithm is investigated over ideal and non-ideal reporting channels, from the fusion center to the CR devices, both analytically and via simulations. Furthermore, the effect of cooperation delay, which causes the decisions received by the CR device from the fusion center to be outdated, is extensively studied, both analytically and via simulations. To overcome the significant performance degradation due to the effect of delay, an extra local sensing cycle is performed at the CR side upon reception of the group decision. Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional hard decisions technique and exhibits a comparable performance to the soft decisions approach at a considerably lower complexity. Moreover, the algorithm is shown to enjoy more robustness against reporting channel errors than the conventional hard decisions-based algorithm. Finally, the extra sensing cycle is shown to dramatically improve the performance for different delay scenarios.