Non-Uniform Quantized Data Fusion Rule Alleviating Control Channel Overhead for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this correspondence, the authors propose a nonuniform quantized data fusion (N-QDF) rule alleviating control channel overhead for energy detection based cooperative spectrum sensing scheme in cognitive radio systems. Though soften hard or quantized data fusion (QDF) technique carries few-bit overhead from each user but it prescribes an improved solution between detection performance and complexity. Again higher-bit QDF provides greater detection probability than lower-bit QDF, due to the loss of more information in lower-bit QDF. In this paper, we derive a non-uniform quantized data fusion (N-QDF) rule that simultaneously enhances the detection probability for a given false alarm probability & higher bit QDF with minimum control channel overhead. We have conducted an extensive simulation study where the performance of variable-bit N-QDF technique is compared with different uniform i.e. 3, 4, 5 bit QDF techniques with respect to different parameters to validate our proposed scheme.