Utilization of idle time slot in spectrum sensing under noise uncertainty

Abstract

Spectrum sensing in cognitive radio (CR) is a critical process as it directly influences the accuracy of detection. Noise uncertainty affects the reliability of detecting vacant holes in the spectrum, thus limiting the access of that spectrum by secondary users (SUs). In such uncertain environment; SUs sense the received power of a primary user (PU) independently with different measures of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Long sensing time serves in mitigating the effect of noise uncertainty, but on the cost of throughput performance of CR system. In this paper, the scheme of an asynchronous and crossed sensing-reporting is presented. The scheme reduces energy consumption during sensing process without affecting the detection accuracy. Exploiting the included idle time (𝑇𝑖) in sensing time slot; each SU collects power samples with higher SNR directly performs the reporting process to a fusion center (FC) consecutively. The FC terminates the sensing and reporting processes at a specific sensing time that corresponds to the lowest SNR (𝑆𝑁𝑅𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙). Furthermore, this integrated scheme aims at optimizing the total frame duration (𝑇𝑓). Mathematical expressions of the scheme are obtained. Analytical results show the efficiency of the scheme in terms of energy saving and throughput increment under noise uncerainty.