An Adaptive Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Scheme Based on the k-out-of-N Fusion Rule

Abstract

In cognitive radio networks, cooperative sensing has been identified as an important technique in MAC-layer sensing. Intuitively, the more secondary users (SUs) are involved in sensing, the more sensing accuracy the SUs can achieve, whereas the more reporting delay the SUs consume, the less throughput the SUs can achieve. Thus, an important issue associated with SUs is how to maximize the SUs throughput under the constraint that the Primary Users (PUs) are sufficiently protected. To solve this issue, we develop a new sensing scheme to decrease the consumption of reporting delay and prove the unimodal characteristics of the SUs average throughput as a function of the fusion parameters based on the k-out-of-N fusion rule. Computer simulations show that, based on the developed sensing scheme and the proposed numerical optimization algorithm, significant improvement in the average throughput of SUs is achieved.