Collaborative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio

Today's wireless communication systems follow fixed spectrum assignment policies which leads to overall inefficient spectrum use. Further, spectrum scarcity is an issue for operators with emerging mobile services and large number of users with even higher capacity requirements. This inefficiency and scarcity in spectrum usage necessitates a new paradigm for communications such as utilising available spectrum opportunistically. Cognitive Radio (CR) is an enabling technology having potential to increase spectrum utilisation and provide desired interference protection to licenced users. This can be done by detection of spectrum opportunities by secondary users. Due to channel fading and shadowing a single user can not make a reliable decision and collaboration of and among users is required. In this paper, it has been demonstrated that for improved detection performance decision fusion algorithm for collaborative spectrum sensing must have information about channel and the mean SNR of all secondary users. Using Monte Carlo simulations it is concluded that for optimum performance it is not necessary that all users collaborate with each other.