On the decision fusion for cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

Cooperation among different cognitive radios is used to enhance the sensing performance by exploiting the multiuser diversity. Soft and Hard decision fusion schemes are usually employed at the fusion center to detect the presence or absence of primary user. Soft decision fusion schemes perform better than hard fusion schemes but at the cost of increased bandwidth burden on the control channel. In this context, we propose a semi-soft fusion scheme to achieve a tradeoff between sensing performance and bandwidth cost. Under this scheme, each cognitive radio makes a local decision and sends one or two-bit data to the fusion center based on the observed test statistics. On the basis of received data, fusion center estimates the global test statistics which are then compared to a predetermined threshold to make the final decision. Furthermore, a closed form expression for average bandwidth cost for the proposed scheme is also derived. MATLAB simulation demonstrates that the performance of the proposed semi-soft fusion approaches to that of soft fusion scheme with a remarkable reduction in the bandwidth cost of control channel.