Multi-Path Hybrid Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio

Inefficient utilization of the authorized spectrum emerges cognitive radio (CR) as a hopeful technology for both present and future telecommunications. It is owing to the potency to leverage the obtainable bandwidth of other wireless communication networks and thereby increase its occupancy. The key feature for the cognitive radio system for distinguishing the blank spectrum is spectrum sensing. This paper is intended to establish a hybrid sensing model for spectrum detection in CR to enhance the sensing efficiency of traditional techniques of spectrum sensing, which consists of two parallel paths of hybrid detectors. The first path is formed from two sequential detector stages; in the first phase, energy detector is used to recognize the PU signal existence where the signal has not been identified. Maximum–Minimum Eigenvalue (MME) is used as a second stage to detect the PU signal presence. The second path consists of two parallel stage detectors employing separate ED and MME to detect the PU signal individually, the two results are gathered to make a decision, and then the final detection decision is determined based on the two paths’ detection combined results. The proposed hybrid sensing approach adopted for enhancing the sensing performance is validated with conventional methods. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms various traditional and hybrid approaches in terms of maximizing the detection probability on the specified limitations on the false alarm probability, as it can increase the detection probability to 94% instead of 79% for the parallel detector at SNR = − 10 dB and P_fa = 0.1.