Optimal Voting Rule and Minimization of Total Error Rate in Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio technology, spectrum sensing is essential for detecting spectrum holes which may be allotted to secondary users. In this paper, an optimal voting rule is used for cooperative spectrum sensing while minimizing the total error rate (TER). The proposed spectrum sensing method is more energy-efficient and may be implemented in practice. It is relied upon in an improved energy detector whose utilization depends on the presence or absence of the primary user. Expressions for false alarm and missed detection probabilities are derived in the paper as well. Overall performance is analyzed both for AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels, in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The optimum voting rule is applied to the cooperative spectrum sensing process in order to identify the optimum number of sensing nodes and the detection threshold. Finally, an energy-efficient spectrum sensing algorithm is proposed, requiring a lower number of cognitive users for a given error bound.