A novel cooperative spectrum sensing scheme based on channel-usage in cognitive radio networks

Spectrum sensing is the key functionality of cognitive radio to detect active primary users and avoid secondary users interfering with them simultaneously. However, spectrum sensing can cause negative effects such as decreasing secondary users' transmission time, and consuming their limited energy. This paper introduces a novel adaptive cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, which adaptively regulates the spectrum sensing periods according to channel usage characteristics and the number of secondary users in cooperative spectrum sensing. The proposed strategy aims at improving the available spectrum utilization and reducing sensing overhead in cognitive radio networks. The proposed spectrum sensing scheme is evaluated by the defined functions, i.e., the detection efficiency and the detection cost. Numerical results show that this method can achieve maximizing the detection efficiency and minimizing the detection cost rather than the conventional fixed period sensing method in cognitive radio networks.