Opportunistic spectrum sensing in cognitive radio systems

This paper proposes an opportunistic spectrum sensing scheme where a single secondary user with the highest channel condition is selected for spectrum sensing. Contrary to the MRC-based sensing scheme, the proposed sensing scheme is efficient in terms of energy consumption and signaling overheads. We show that the proposed opportunistic sensing scheme achieves comparable throughput efficiency to the MRC based cooperative sensing while it significantly reduces power consumption and signaling overheads.