Implementation issues for optimized hard decision energy detector-based cooperative spectrum sensing

Abstract

Recent studies in cooperative energy detection have focused on the optimization of the threshold value and fusion center voting rule in an effort to minimize the sensing error probability. However, such studies operate under the assumption that the signal to noise ratio is equal at every node, which is rarely the case in practice.In this paper, generalized formulas for the optimal threshold value and optimal fusion center voting rule are derived for hard decision energy detector-based spectrum sensing networks where the signal to noise ratio is distinct at each node. It is shown that the implementation of this solution requires more data to be transmitted than the optimal soft decision scheme, which is known to have superior performance.