Cooperative Spectrum Sensing with Adaptive Double-Threshold Based Energy Detector in Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Spectrum sensing is one of the key functionalities in the implementation of cognitive radio. It is used to sense the unused spectrum in an opportunistic manner. In this paper, we propose an energy detector with adaptive double-threshold for spectrum sensing, to optimize the detection performance at a fixed probability of false alarm $$(\text{ P }_\mathrm{f})$$ ( P f ) i.e. 0.1, which also overcomes sensing failure problem. In the present work, the detection threshold is made adaptive to the fluctuation of the received signal power in each local detector of cognitive radio (CR) user. Simulation results show that proposed scheme optimizes better detection performance and outperforms both conventional energy detector and cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) method by 12.8 and 3.3 % at $$-$$ ? 8 dB signal to noise ratio (SNR), respectively. While utilizing CSS with proposed adaptive double-threshold scheme, where each CR user use a double threshold detectors for local detection and send detection decisions to fusion center (FC) to give the final decision based on hard decision rule. It is further found that CSS with adaptive double-threshold improves detection performance around 26.8 and 7.6 % as compare to CSS with single threshold and Hierarchical with quantization method at $$-$$ ? 10 dB SNR, respectively, under the case when a small number of sensing nodes are used in spectrum sensing.