Cooperative spectrum sensing scheme with light communication overhead in cognitive radio networks

Spectrum sensing is a key component of cognitive radio networks. Compared with the single user spectrum sensing, cooperative spectrum sensing can detect the existence of the primary signal for improving the inference accuracy. However, cooperation induces additional communications overhead. In this paper, we propose a new cooperative spectrum sensing scheme with a light communication overhead caused by cooperation in cognitive radio networks. We also present two strategies for refreshing the confidence threshold. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, our proposed scheme has a lower communication overhead as well as a nearly same detection performance.