An Efficient Distributed Approach for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Varying Interests Cognitive Radio Networks

The rapid growth in wireless communications, coupled with insufficient utilization of the spectrum, led to the development of new wireless services and the promising technology of cognitive radio (CR) networks, which facilitate periodic access to the unoccupied spectrum bands and thus increases spectral efficiency. A fundamental task in CR networks is spectrum sensing, through which unauthorized secondary users (SUs) detect unoccupied bands in the spectrum. To achieve this, an accurate estimate of the power spectrum is necessary. From this perspective, and given that many other factors can affect individual detection, such as pathloss and receiver uncertainty, we aim to improve its estimate by exploiting the spatial diversity in the SUs’ observations. Spectrum sensing is treated as a parameters estimation problem, assuming that the parameters’ vector of each SU consists of some global and partially common parameters. To exploit this modeling, distributed and cooperative spectrum sensing is the subject of interest in this study. Diffusion techniques, and especially the Adapt-Then-Combine (ATC) method will be exploited, where each SU cooperates with a group of nodes in its neighborhood that share the same parameters of interest. We consider a network of three static PUs with overlapping power spectrums, and thus, frequency bands. The performance of the employed method will be evaluated under two scenarios: (i) when the PUs spectrum varies, since some frequency bands are not yet utilized, and (ii) when the frequency bands of the PUs are fixed, but there is a mobile SU in the network, changing regions and parameters of interest. Experimental results and performance analysis reveal the ATC algorithm robustness and efficiency.