Throughput Enhancing Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Strategies for Cognitive Radios

We consider a wireless communication scenario where multiple unlicensed cognitive users seek to access unused frequency channels licensed to the primary users. A main challenge in this case is to design a spectrum sensing strategy that aids the cognitive users acquire the unused spectrum and limits the interference to primary users. Towards addressing this challenge, we propose a cooperative spectrum sensing strategy in which cognitive users collaborate to share their decisions regarding spectrum occupancy of the primary users. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative sensing strategy which aims to equip all cognitive users with the occupancy information of as many channels as possible, and observe that the proposed cooperative spectrum sensing strategy improves the throughput of the cognitive users and decreases the interference to the primary users as compared to the non-cooperative scheme.