A New Sampling Scheme for Distributed Blind Spectrum Sensing Using Energy Detectors

In this paper, we study the problem of blind spectrum sensing by exploring signal sampling at each cognitive radio (CR) in a distributed cognitive radio network. Specifically, a new cooperative sampling scheme is proposed to deal with the challenge of unknown signal-to-noise ratio and level of noise power at each CR, which is a more realistic assumption in distributed spectrum sensing. We prove that the observations acquired by the proposed collaborative sampling are informative from an information theoretic perspective. Simulation results also demonstrate better receiver operating characteristics (ROC) of the proposed sampling scheme than the traditional uniform sampling scheme.