A Distance Based Reliable Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Algorithm in Cognitive Radio

Spectrum sensing is the most critical task in cognitive radio (CR) which needs to be performed very precisely in order to efficiently utilize the underutilized spectrum and to provide sufficient protection to the primary users (PUs). To improve the sensing performance under fading, shadowing and hidden terminal problems more than one CR users collaboratively perform the spectrum sensing called as cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS). In conventional CSS the decision of each CR is fused at fusion center with equal weights. But due to variable distance of each CR from the PU all decisions are not equally reliable and therefore should be assigned different weights according to their reliability. In this paper we propose a new weighting scheme for CSS under Rayleigh faded channel. In proposed weighting scheme, based on the distance of each CR from the PU reliability of CR nodes is determined and correspondingly appropriate weights are assigned to different users. The CSS algorithm using new weighting scheme gives better performance than conventional CSS algorithm.