Cooperative Spectrum Sensing with Cluster-Based Architecture in Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio networks, the limitation of control channel bandwidth is a challenge of cooperative spectrum sensing when the number of cognitive users becomes very large. Cluster- based architecture is applied for cooperative sensing to avoid the congestion on control channel and reduce the sensing delay. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based cooperative spectrum sensing scheme to improve the efficiency of the network. The number of clusters effects both the system efficiency and detection performance significantly. By balancing the tradeoff between the communication overhead and sensing reliability, we can obtain the optimal number of clusters, which can minimize the cooperation overhead without any performance loss of reliability. Moreover, a clustering strategy is proposed based on a given number of clusters and simulation results show the superiority of the proposed strategy.