Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Under a Random Geometric Primary User Network Model

Abstract

We propose a novel cooperative spectrum sensing algorithm for a cognitive radio (CR) network to detect a primary user (PU) network that exhibits some degree of randomness in topology (e.g., due to mobility). We model the PU network as a random geometric network that can better describe small-scale mobile PUs. Based on this model, we formulate the random PU network detection problem in which the CR network detects the presence of a PU receiver within a given detection area. To address this problem, we propose a location-aware cooperative sensing algorithm that linearly combines multiple sensing results from secondary users (SUs) according to their geographical locations. In particular, we invoke the Fisher linear discriminant analysis to determine the linear coefficients for combining the sensing results. The simulation results show that the proposed sensing algorithm yields comparable performance to the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) detector and outperforms the existing ones, such as equal coefficient combining, OR-rule-based and AND-rule-based cooperative sensing algorithms, by a very wide margin.