Optimum number of secondary users in cooperative spectrum sensing methods based on random matrix theory

Cognitive Radio is an opportunistic solution in wireless networks for optimal usage of allocated spectrum and the most important part of cognitive radio is spectrum sensing. It has been shown that eigenvalue based cooperative spectrum sensing algorithms outperform single user spectrum sensing and other cooperative algorithms such as energy detection. In this paper we investigate optimum number of secondary users for eigenvalue based spectrum sensing algorihms by considering detection performance and resource usage efficiency. We define a target function based on performance and resource usage to find optimum number of users. Simulation results show that cooperative spectrum sensing target function is maximized through selecting few numbers of users for cooperation.