A novel approach in cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio

Radio spectrum is being underutilized. Cognitive Radio acts as a solution to the problem of spectrum under-utilization. Spectrum sensing is the most important feature of Cognitive Radio. Cooperative spectrum sensing improves sensing performance by including a number of cognitive users rather than a single one. In cooperative spectrum sensing, each cognitive radio performs individual spectrum sensing by any of the available methods and individual sensing results are combined according to certain rules. We propose a novel method where signal to noise ratio, credibility and position information of secondary users are used for spectrum sensing. They are much important factors that affect the sensing, but were not considered in previous works. The performance of this scheme is investigated by simulation results and is much better than the traditional ones. Significant improvement in detection probabilities are achieved reducing false alarm rates even in situations including malicious users and hidden primary user.