Optimal Linear Cooperation for Signal Classification in Cognitive Communication Networks

Signal classification plays an important role in cognitive communication networks to identify and avoid interference. Contrary to traditional cooperative spectrum sensing based on binary hypothesis testing, we study a network of cognitive radios that jointly perform linear cooperation based signal classification via M-ary hypothesis testing. To maximize the probability of successful classification subject to constraints on individual probabilities of misclassification, we divide the problem into M independent binary hypothesis testing subproblems in parallel before selecting the hypothesis that is most likely true. Furthermore, we consider a problem that maximizes the probability of successful classification subject to a constraint on the total probability of misclassification. We reformulate such an optimization problem into two different subproblems, where the optimal solution is obtained by alternating the two optimization sub-problems iteratively. Numerical simulations demonstrate the near-optimality of the proposed methods with low computational complexity for the cooperative signal classification problems.