Cooperative sensing with adaptive sensing ranges in cognitive radio ad-hoc networks

Cognitive radio has been proposed as an innovative and effective technology to exploit the efficient reuse of the precious radio spectrum. In spectrum sensing which is a crucial step in cognitive radio networks, an adequate sensing range needs to be defined to avoid the hidden transmitter/receiver problems. Moreover, a secondary user may have unreliable detection of the existent primary users due to multipath fading and/or shadowing. To solve these issues, we propose a cooperative spectrum sensing scheme with adaptive sensing ranges, especially for the hidden receiver problem. We explain the idea of using the adaptive sensing range at a secondary user transmitter and show with the simulation results that cooperative spectrum sensing with adaptive sensing ranges achieves a higher detection accuracy than that with a fixed sensing range.