Quick cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive unmanned aerial vehicles networks

Abstract

AbstractIn cognitive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) networks (CUAVNs), cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) has been recognized as a key technology to enable UAVs to detect spectrum holes and opportunistically access primary licensed spectrum band without harmful interference. Considering that the location flexibility of flying UAV spectrum sensors makes the collaborative working mode of multiple UAVs difficult to achieve, this article establishes an easy‐to‐implement intraframe CSS mode by considering the cooperation within the microsensing time slots of a single UAV. On the basis of this, we adopt sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) as the fusion criterion of sensing decisions from microsensing slots to implement quick CSS for multiple channels under the sensing delay limit and make an investigation the achievable throughput of truncated‐SPRT for CUAVNs. Due to the uncertainty of the sensing decision number required in SPRT, we further propose a soft truncation (ST) way to terminate SPRT process and further evaluate the global CSS performance. At last, numerical simulation results show that the CSS efficiency of the proposed intraframe CSS outperforms that of the traditional interframe CSS, and the performance of ST‐SPRT is also better than hard truncation (HT)‐SPRT, in terms of the detection performance and throughput, especially in the multichannel spectrum sensing scenario.