Performance Estimation of Improved Cooperative Spectrum Sensing under Fading Environment

Abstract

To deal with spectrum scarcity, Cognitive radio has been considered as a resolving technology. Energy detection(ED) is the most preferable sensing technique due to its lower complexity, ease of working and non-dependency on primary user data requirements. Although having many advantages, ED has some practical limitations like low SNR, shadowing, erroneous reporting channels and multipath fading. Here, a comparative study is done to check the effect of such parameters. And with simulation, it is proven that Cooperative spectrum sensing can reduce the effect of these confines. In this paper, we have also simulated the improved version of ED where decision making is done cooperatively. The results show that the performance of Improved Energy Detection (IED) is more efficient than the Classical ED, not only for AWGN, but also under fading environment. Cooperative spectrum sensing enhances the performance further. Under fading environment, the majority logic with centralized fusion centre performs better than other techniques. In this paper the performance estimation of Improved Energy Detection technique is done under Rayleigh fading environment and the positive effect of cooperation is also evaluated considering erroneous reports and imperfect reporting channels.