Optimal energy-efficient cooperative sensing scheduling for Cognitive Radio Networks with QoS guarantee

Cooperative spectrum sensing, which can profoundly improve the ability of discovering the spectrum opportunities, is regarded as an enabling mechanism for Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). One of the most fundamental problems in cooperative spectrum sensing is how to assign Secondary Users (SUs) to sense different primary channels such that SUs can achieve a good balance between sensing accuracy and the exploration of potential “spectrum holes”. This problem becomes more challenging when the primary channels require heterogeneous detection probabilities for incumbent protection. In this paper, the Cooperative Sensing Scheduling with QoS guarantee (CSS-Q) problem is studied for designing energy-efficient CRNs.We first explore the inherent structure of the CSS-Q problem and find several useful properties for it. Then, based on these properties a novel and efficient algorithm is proposed to solve the problem optimally. Sufficient numerical results are also presented to validate our analysis.