Cyclostationarity-based cooperative spectrum sensing over imperfect reporting channels

Reliable detection of weak primary user signals is a crucial problem for cognitive radio networks. To address the above issue, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) methods based on cyclostationary detection (CD) have been introduced in the literature. In this paper, a soft decision-based CSS method based on the second-order CD at secondary users (SUs) is proposed. The proposed scheme aims to maximize the deflection criterion at the fusion center (FC), while the reporting channels are characterized by Rayleigh fading. To this end, a fusion rule which does not require to know the noise variances of sensing channels is developed. Since the fusion rule assumes the perfect knowledge of channel state information (CSI) of reporting links, it has theoretical significance and provides an upper bound for the performance of cyclostationarity-based CSS. We have also proposed a more practical suboptimum fusion rule and studied its detection performance in the presence of uncertainties in noise variance and channel power gain estimations. Furthermore, in order to be able to evaluate the performance of the CSS, an analytic threshold estimation method has been proposed. Extensive simulation results have been illustrated the robustness of the proposed method compared to the existing cyclostationary detectors.