Enhanced Sensing and Sum-Rate Analysis in a Cognitive Radio-Based Internet of Things

Abstract

Spectrum sensing plays a vital role in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) for identifying the spectrum hole. However, an individual cognitive radio user in a CRN does not obtain sufficient sensing performance and sum rate of the primary and secondary links to support the future Internet of Things (IoT) using conventional detection techniques such as the energy detection (ED) technique in a noise-uncertain environment. In an environment comprising noise uncertainty, the performance of conventional energy detection techniques is significantly degraded owing to the noise fluctuation caused by the noise temperature, interference, and filtering. To mitigate this problem, we present a cooperative spectrum sensing technique that comprises the use of the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD) in cognitive radio-based IoT (CR-IoT). In the proposed method, each unlicensed IoT device that is capable of spectrum sensing, which is called a CR-IoT user, makes a local decision using the KLD technique. The spectrum sensing performed with the KLD requires a smaller number of samples than other conventional approaches, e.g., energy detection, for reliable sensing even in a noise uncertain environment. After the local decision is made, each CR-IoT user sends its own local decision result to the corresponding fusion center, which makes a global decision using the soft fusion rule. The results obtained through simulations show that the proposed KLD scheme achieves a better sensing performance, i.e., higher detection and lower false-alarm probabilities, enhances the sum rate, and reduces the total time as compared to the conventional ED scheme under various fading channels.