Super-allocation and Cluster-based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

An allocation of sensing and reporting times is proposed to improve the sensing performance by scheduling them in an efficient way for cognitive radio networks with cluster-based cooperative spectrum sensing. In the conventional cooperative sensing scheme, all secondary users (SUs) detect the primary user (PU) signal to check the availability of the spectrum during a fixed sensing time slot. The sensing results from the SUs are reported to cluster heads (CHs) during the reporting time slots of the SUs and the CHs forward them to a fusion center (FC) during the reporting time slots of the CHs through the common control channels for the global decision, respectively. However, the delivery of the local decision from SUs and CHs to a CH and FC requires a time which does not contribute to the performance of spectrum sensing and system throughput. In this paper, a super-allocation technique, which merges reporting time slots of SUs and CHs to sensing time slots of SUs by re-scheduling the reporting time slots, has been proposed to sense the spectrum more accurately. In this regard, SUs in each cluster can obtain a longer sensing duration depending on their reporting order and their clusters except for the first SU belonged to the first cluster. The proposed scheme, therefore, can achieve better sensing performance under -28 dB to -10 dB environments and will thus reduce reporting overhead.