Improved Detection Performance of Cognitive Radio Networks in AWGN and Rayleigh Fading Environments

Cognitive radios (CRs) have been recently emerging as prime candidates to enhance spectral efficiency by exploiting spectrum-aware systems which can reliably monitor licensed users’ activities. CR users monitor such activities by performing spectrum sensing to detect potential white spaces. However, this process of local sensing might be a challenging task in fading environments. The inefficiency of spectrum sensing might cause interference to licensees if they are miss-detected by CR users. Thus, cooperative spectrum sensing is proposed as a means to combat fading and improve the detection performance. However, the detection performance does not improve by such cooperation when low-SNR environment is considered. In this paper, cooperative spectrum sensing with PSO-based threshold adaptation is presented to address the aforementioned problem. Simulation results show that the detection performance with PSO-based adaptive detection threshold is improved, particularly, in low-SNR environment.