United Versus Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks (C-WSNs)

Abstract

Cooperation is an effective method to increase the performance metrics of spectrum sensing in cognitive radio (CR). For spectrum sensing in cognitive wireless sensor networks (C-WSNs), low complexity and consequently low performance methods are applicable due to resource constraint. Also, we can profit the cooperation for overcoming the noise uncertainty, fading, shadowing, hidden primary user problem etc. But, low performance methods increase severely false alarm rate \((P_{Fa})\) and waste the precious resources of sensor nodes, because of collisions and retransmitions. In this paper, we propose two approaches for utilizing high performance spectrum sensing methods in C-WSNs. Then, we focus on our second approach i.e. United Spectrum Sensing, as a more comprehensive method than conventional cooperative spectrum sensing in CR, to solve the problem of high performance spectrum sensing in C-WSNs.