Study on Cooperative Sensing in Cognitive Radio based AD-HOC Network

In this paper, we propose a soft decision based cooperative sensing method for cognitive radio (CR) in ad-hoc networks. A CR can sense a surrounding radio environment and adapt to the environment by the reconfigurability to achieve more effective frequency utilization. Observing the environment, CR should detect presence or absence of primary user and exploits this information to opportunistically provide communication among secondary users while performance of primary user should not be deteriorated by the secondary users. Because of multi- path fading or shadowing, the detection of primary users may be significantly difficult. For this problem, cooperative sensing (CS), where gathered observations obtained by multiple users is utilized to achieve higher performance of detection, has been investigated. We propose a soft decision based CS where test statistic used in traditional single user energy detection is treated as soft decision information. The detector is designed analytically, i.e., the statistic of the performance, detection probability and given false alarm, can be obtained analytically. By computer simulations, we have presented as follows; validity of analysis and that the CS has better performance compared to non-cooperative sensing. In addition, we have presented the detection performance of cooperative sensing when there are considerable differences regarding signal to noise ratio among users.