Abstract

Spectrum sensing is a key enabling technology for cognitive radio networks (CRNs). The main objective of spectrum sensing is to provide more spectrum access opportunities to cognitive radio users without interfering with the operations of the licensed network. Spectrum sensing decisions can lead to erroneous sensing with low performance due to fading, shadowing and other interferences caused by either terrain inconsistency or dense urban structure. In order to improve spectrum sensing decisions, in this paper a cooperative spectrum sensing scheme is proposed. The propagation conditions such as the variance and intensity of terrain and urban structure between two points with respect to signal propagation are taken into consideration. We have also derived the optimum fusion rule which accounts for location reliability of secondary users (SUs). The analytical results show that the proposed scheme slightly outperform the conventional cooperative spectrum sensing approaches.

Key words: Cooperative spectrum sensing, location-aware, cognitive radio, signal propagation, urban propagation.