Non-uniform Quantized Data Fusion Rule for Data Rate Saving and Reducing Control Channel Overhead for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper a pretty new concept of non-uniform quantized data fusion (N-QDF) rule reducing control channel data overhead has been proposed for energy detection based cooperative spectrum sensing scheme in cognitive radio networks. To strike a balance between efficient detection performance and less complexity, the network has to allow soften hard or quantized data fusion (QDF) technique though this technique incurs few bit overhead on the control channel from each user. Again lower bit QDF causes loss of more information, where as higher bit QDF increases detection probability at the cost of some extra bits per user. Here lies the beauty of NQDF scheme which uses variable number of bits: more number of bits for lower energy region—thus increases detection probability for a given false alarm, and less number of bits for higher energy region—thus data rate gets saved which in turn alleviates control channel overhead. A holistic simulation study has been done in this very paper where the performance of variable bit NQDF scheme is compared with different uniform bit i.e. 2, 3, 4, 5 QDF with respect to different parameters to validate our proposed scheme.