Improved local spectrum sensing for cognitive radio networks

The successful deployment of dynamic spectrum access requires cognitive radio (CR) to more accurately find the unoccupied portion of the spectrum. An accurate spectrum sensing technique can reduce the probability of false alarms and misdetection. Cooperative spectrum sensing is usually employed to achieve accuracy and improve reliability, but at the cost of cooperation overhead among CR users. This overhead can be reduced by improving local spectrum sensing accuracy. Several signal processing techniques for transmitter detection have been proposed in the literature but more sophisticated approaches are needed to enhance sensing efficiency. This article proposes a two-stage local spectrum sensing approach. In the first stage, each CR performs existing spectrum sensing techniques, i.e., energy detection, matched filter detection, and cyclostationary detection. In the second stage, the output from each technique is combined using fuzzy logic in order to deduce the presence or absence of a primary transmitter. Simulation results verify that our proposed technique outperforms existing local spectrum sensing techniques. The proposed approach shows significant improvement in sensing accuracy by exhibiting a higher probability of detection and low false alarms. The mean detection time of the proposed scheme is equivalent to that of cyclostationary detection.