Energy Detection Based Spectrum Sensing Performance Evaluations in Cooperating Cognitive Radio Networks Ireyuwa

The ever growing wireless technologies has put a lot of demand on the usage of available spectrum, thus leading to spectrum underutilization and scarcity. To address this issue and improve spectrum utilization gave rise to the concept of the cognitive radio. The cognitive radio is known to enhance the utilization of spectrum of where a secondary user can utilize the spectrum of the primary user without causing harmful interference to the incumbent primary user. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of the energy detection based spectrum sensing in a fading and non-fading environments. Also we presented results on the single user detection and cooperative detection applying the energy detector. The performance of the energy detection technique was assessed by the use of the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), Rayleigh and Nakagami channels. The cooperative detection shows better performance to the single user in the fading environments. Keyword– Cognitive radio, cooperative sensing, spectrum sensing,