Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Schemes with the Interference Constraint in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we propose cooperative spectrum sensing schemes, called decode-and-forward cooperative spectrum sensing (DF-CSS) scheme and amplify-and-forward cooperative spectrum sensing (AF-CSS) scheme, in cognitive radio networks. The main goals and features of the proposed cooperative spectrum sensing schemes are as follows: first, we solve the problem of high demand for bandwidth in a soft decision scheme using in our proposed schemes. Furthermore, the impact of transmission power of relaying users which is determined by the interference constraint on sensing performance of cooperative spectrum sensing schemes is also investigated. Second, we analyze the sensing performance of our proposed cooperative spectrum sensing schemes in terms of detection probability and interference probability, respectively. We take into account the interference caused by secondary user (SU) to primary user (PU) in the case that the transmission power of the relaying users exceeds a predefined interference constraint assigned by the primary user. The simulation results show that in cooperative spectrum sensing schemes the total sensing performance depends not only on the interference tolerance level, but also on the relay protocols used. We also prove that high transmission power of relaying users increases the interference between the secondary networks and the primary network.