Optimal Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Multi-channel Cognitive Radio Networks

In a cognitive radio network (CRN), cooperative spectrum sensing could increase the accuracy of the sensing results by mitigating the effect of multipath and shadowing. However, cooperation also introduces additional reporting time corresponding to the number of cooperative secondary users (SUs), which may decrease the throughput of the CRN. In this paper, a problem of jointly optimizing the sensing time, sensing threshold and numbers of cooperative SUs for each channel in multi-channel CRN is formulated to maximize the average achievable throughput of CRN while guaranteeing the priority of the primary user (PU) and the spectrum opportunity for the SUs. Numerical results show that the redundant SUs involved in the spectrum sensing may reduce average throughput, and an improvement in the throughput of the CRN is achieved through the joint optimization.