Performance evaluation of energy detector in Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

The main idea of Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) is to improve detection performance. Each Secondary User (SU) shares sensing information to collect data of the unused bands. One technique to detect those frequency bands is energy detector. This technique uses the threshold level to minimize spectrum sensing error in Cognitive Radio (CR) system. Proper selection of the threshold level results a good detection performance. In addition, detection performance to the unused spectrum is indirectly influenced by error rate. Less error rate in spectrum sensing leads to have a good detection performance. In this paper, the detection performance of CSS is investigated. The proper number of collaboration users with target error rate is determined as well in order to achieve an optimal performance. Total error rate of energy detector, signal to noise ratio (SNR), and number of CR user are used as metric for performance evaluation. Through computer simulation, numbers of CR user, degree of voting rule, and threshold value of energy detector have a significant impact to the achieved performance.