A Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Scheme without Dedicated Reporting Channels: Interference Impact on Primary Users

In cognitive radio networks, cooperative spectrum sensing typically requires two essential phases: the phase of primary user's signal detection by cognitive users and the phase of initial detection result reporting from the cognitive users to a fusion center, which are referred to as detection and reporting phases, respectively. Common control channels (also called dedicated reporting channels) from the cognitive users to fusion center are assumed in previous research to avoid interfering with the primary user in the reporting phase. This, however, requires additional channel resources and increases implementation complexity due to the dedicated reporting channels management. In this paper, we propose an alternative cooperative spectrum sensing framework without dedicated reporting channels and present an interference analysis of its impact on primary users. We show that the interference caused by the proposed scheme is controllable and can be constrained to satisfy a given primary user's quality-of-service (QoS) requirement. By jointly considering the detection and reporting phases, we further examine the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) performance of the proposed cooperative spectrum sensing scheme in Rayleigh fading environment. Numerical results illustrate that, with a guaranteed detection probability constraint, a minimized false alarm probability can be achieved through an optimization of the time durations between the detection and reporting phases.