Performance of Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Under Rician and Nakagami Fading

Abstract

In a dynamic spectrum access (DSA) network, a secondary user (SU) that deploys a simple energy detector could access the unoccupied spectrum upon sensing the absence of primary signal. However, sensing accuracy could be compromised due to signal fading. For improved accuracy, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) has been proposed, where spectrum occupancy is decided based on the combined results from multiple SUs. Two combining techniques that are commonly used are equal gain combining (EGC) and selection combining (SC). In this paper, we investigate the performance of CSS that implements (i) EGC, and (ii) SC technique, over independent and identically distributed (i) Rician, and (ii) Nakagami fading channels, which can model fading conditions that are less or more severe than the commonly used Rayleigh distribution. Novel expressions for the probability of detecting primary signal, P d , have been derived and numerically evaluated.