Abstract
Cognitive radio has been proposed to mitigate the spectrum scarcity problem by allowing the secondary users to access the under-utilized frequency bands and opportunistically transmit. Spectrum sensing, as a key technology in cognitive radio, is required to reliably detect the presence of primary users to avoid the harmful interference. However, it would be very hard to reliably detect the presence of primary users due to the channel fading, shadowing. In this paper, we proposed a distributed cooperative spectrum sensing scheme based on conventional DF (decode-and-forward) cooperative diversity protocol. We fist consider the cooperation between two secondary users to illustrate that cooperation among secondary users can obviously increase the detection performance. We then compare the performance of DF based scheme with another conventional AF (amplify-and-forward) protocol based scheme. And it is found that the proposed scheme based on DF has a better detection performance than the one based on AF. After that, we extend the number of cooperative secondary users, and demonstrate that increasing the cooperation number can significantly improve the detection performance.
