Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio

Abstract

Due to the rapid growth of new wireless communication services and applications,need for radio frequency (RF) spectrum is continuously increasing. Most of the available RF spectrum is already been licensed to the existing wireless systems.On the other hand, it is found that spectrum is significantly under utilized due to the static frequency allocation to the dedicated users and hence the spectrum holes or spectrum opportunities arise. Considering the scarce RF spectrum,supporting new services and applications is a challenging task that requires innovative technologies capable of providing new ways of exploiting the available radio spectrum. Cognitive Radio (CR) has received immense research attention,both in the academia and industry, as it is considered a promising solution to the problem of spectrum scarcity by introducing the notion of opportunistic spectrum usage. An alternative to antenna diversity is the cooperative spectrum sensing where multiple secondary users also known as cooperating secondary users collaborate newlineby sharing their sensing information for the detection of the spectrum opportunities. newlineFinally, in our last work, we propose novel detection algorithm for cooperative newlinewideband spectrum sensing. We make use of hard combining for data fusion since it minimizes the bandwidth requirements of the control channel. We show that the proposed algorithm performs better than algorithm without cooperative newlinesensing. newline newline