Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio

Access in Fading Environments

H.Errachid ADARDOUR
STIC Laboratory, University of Tlemcen , Algeria
E-mail: 14harounerrachid@gmail.com


Maghnia FEHAM and Mohammed FEHAM
STIC Laboratory, University of Tlemcen , Algeria
E-mail: m_feham@mail.univ-tlemcen.dz
Abstract The cognitive radio is a new paradigm in the
history and the design of wireless communications. Cognitive
radio emerged aiming to increase and to improve the using the
radio spectrum in allowing access in a dynamic manner and
opportunist. In this paper, we first propose a brief survey on
Cognitive radio. Thus, we have studied performance from the
policy of spectrum sensing in Cognitive Radio. One of the
problems of cognitive radios systems is the ability to detect the
presence of the primary user with fast speed and high accuracy.
Another problem is the fading phenomenon. Due to the effect of
fading phenomenon, cognitive radios may be not detect the
presence of a primary terminal and as a result interfere on the
latter. For thwart the effect of fading, a possibility is to make
cooperative between secondary users with each other, this work
is finished with a simulations quantify performance of spectrum
sensing in fading environments and study effect of cooperative
spectrum sensing.

Keywords-Cognitive Radio; Spectrum Sensing; Energy detector;
Rayleigh channels
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless communications are nowadays a dominant part of
our lives: from domotics, through industrial applications and
up to infomobility services. The key to the co-existence of
wireless systems operating in closely located or even
overlapping areas, is sharing of the spectral resource. The
optimization of this resource is the main driving force behind
the emerging changes in the policies for radio resources
allocation. The current approach in spectrum usage specifies
fixed frequency bands and transmission power limits for each
radio transmitting system. This approach leads to a very low
medium utilization factor for some frequency bands, caused
by inefficient service allocation over vast geographical areas
(radiomobile, radio and TV broadcasting, WiMAX) and also
by the usage of large guard bands, obsolete now due to
technological progress [1].
With the rapid growth of wireless communication and the
static of spectrum, it has been observed that most of the
allocated spectrum is under-utilized. However, a number of
new wireless standards and applications are emerging which
requires a substantial amount of spectrum to operate on. To
tackle the spectrum scarcity, cognitive radio (CR) technology
has been presented. Two major tasks in CR are exploration
and exploitation of the spectrum. Spectrum exploration is to
identify the available and free spectrum unused by the licensed
users. Spectrum exploitation is to access the available
spectrum [2]. the term cognitive radio, dened by Mitola [3],
was recently reused by the FCC [4] to dene a class of
terminals which are able to modify their transmission
parameters based on interaction with their environment.
Cognitive radio is the promising technique for utilizing the
available spectrum optimally. The important aspect of
cognitive radio is spectrum sensing and from that identifying
the opportunistic spectrum for secondary user communication
[5].
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The
section II gives a brief overview of the concept cognitive radio
technology. In section III, we describe the policy of spectrum
sensing. Section IV presents the performance of spectrum
sensing and we describe cooperative spectrum detection
technique to boost the detection capability of a CR network in
fading environment. Then, the section V provides simulation
study with performance results for the energy detection and
the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing over
Rayleigh channel. Finally, the section VI offers concluding
remarks.
II. COGNITIVE RADIO TECHNOLOGY
Cognitive radio technology is used the spectrum in a
dynamic manner [6]. The cognitive radio enables the usage of
temporally unused spectrum, which is referred to as spectrum
hole [7] as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Spectrum hole concept
The functionalities required for CR networks vary
according to whether the spectrum is authorized (licensed) or
unauthorized (unlicensed):
a) Licensed band CR: CR users try to exploit the unused
spectrum in the licensed spectrum band.
b) Unlicensed band CR: if no primary user occupies the
spectrum, then secondary users (CR) have equal right to
access the spectrum [6].
III. THE POLICY OF SPECTRUM SENSING
Obviously, the policy of spectrum sensing is the first step
for a cognitive radio communication. This policy of spectrum
sensing is a binary hypothesis-testing problem, the goal of
sensing is to distinguish the following two hypotheses:




(1)
H0 and H1 represent: the scenarios of the absence of the
primary user and the presence of the primary user, respectively,
as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. The policy of detection
A. Evaluation of spectrum sensing
The performance in spectrum sensing is evaluated by the
probability of correct detection probability of false
alarm and probability of miss detection which
are given by respectively,

(2)

(3)

(4)
Where represents the decision threshold the presence or
the absence of the primary user [8].
B. Spectrum Sensing Techniques
Authors in [7], [8], [9] and [10] provided a classification of
sensing techniques which can be employed in the spectrum
sensing such as Energy Detection, Matched Filter Detection,
Cyclostationary Detection, Wavelet Detection, Cooperative
spectrum sensing In this section we describe the Energy
Detection technique and Cooperative spectrum sensing.
1) Energy Detection
Energy detection is a non-coherent and simple detection
method [10]. This approach is based on the detection of
energy. The users sense the presence/absence of the primary
user (PU) based on the energy of the received signals [11]. In
this method, the received signals is filtered by band pass filter
with bandwidth W, squared and integrated over an interval T.
Finally, the integrated value is compared with a threshold to
decide whether the PU is present or not [12]. The block
diagram of an energy detector [13] is shown in Fig. 3.
A binary hypothesis model for transmitter detection, i.e.,
the model of signals received by the PU, is defined as




(5)
Where denotes the observation time interval. and
represent the signal received by CR and the transmitted
signal of the primary user respectively, and represent
the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and the amplitude
gain of the channel respectively.

Fig. 3. The structure of energy detector
The probability of detection and probability of false
alarm of energy detector over AWGN channel are
approximated by [14], [7]:

(6)

(7)
(8)
Where and are complete and incomplete
gamma functions, respectively.

is the generalized
Marcum -function [15] and [16], is instantaneous signal-
to-noise ratio (SNR), is time bandwidth product
and is the decision threshold of energy detector.
2) Cooperative Spectrum Sensing
One of the most critical issues of spectrum sensing is the
fading phenomenon, Due to the effect of fading phenomenon;
the cognitive radio cannot detect the presence of a primary
terminal and as a result interfere on the latter.

Fig. 4. Cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio
Fig. 4 shows a scenario where only one secondary user can
able to detect the primary signal and the other users cannot
detect the presence of a primary signal. We consider a CR
network composed of CRs (secondary users) and the base
station Cognitive radio (BS) which manages this CR network
and all CRs [17].
IV. PERFORMANCE OF SPECTRUM SENSING
A. Evaluation of spectrum sensing
Throughout this paper, we assume that energy detection is
applied at each CR user (Fig. 3). The energy detector consists
of a square law device followed by a finite time integrator.
The output of the integrator at any time is the energy of the
input to the squaring device over the interval T. The noise pre-
filter serves to limit the noise bandwidth [18].
The energy detection is performed by measuring the energy
of the received signal in a xed bandwidth over an
observation time window [12]. The performance analysis of
the energy detector has been studied for AWGN channels in
[7], [17] and 14] and for Rayleigh fading channels in [13].
We assume that each cognitive radio performs local
spectrum sensing independently. For simplicity, we consider
the ith cognitive radio only to see how the
energy detector works. The local spectrum sensing is to decide
between the following two hypotheses:

(9)
and represent the signal observed at the ith
cognitive radio and the signal transmitted from the PU,
respectively.

and represent the additive white

Gaussian noise (AWGN) and the complex channel gain of the
sensing channel between the PU and the ith cognitive radio,
respectively [8].
We denote the output of integrator in Fig. 3 by

, Note
that the test statistic,

, follows the distribution:

(10)
In (10),

and

are a central chi-square

distribution with degrees of freedom and A noncentral chi-
square distribution with degrees of freedom and
noncentrality parameter

, respectively.
If the signal amplitude follows a Rayleigh distribution, the
SNR follows an exponential PDF given by (11):

(11)
gives the probability of the detection conditioned on
instantaneous SNR as follows:

(12)
For the th cognitive radio with the energy detector [7], the
average probability of detection over Rayleigh fading channel

may be obtained by (12).

(13)
The average probability of false alarm and the average
probability of miss over Rayleigh fading channels are given
by, respectively,

(14)

(15)
In (13),

is the average SNR of the PU signal at the th

CR [14].
B. Cooperative spectrum sensing performance
The performance of cooperative Spectrum Sensing is
proposed in reference [17] and [19], [20].
In this section, we consider two simple decision fusion
rules to decide whether the primary user is in operation.
Before being described these rules, we consider be the
binary decision from the ith cognitive radio at the BS for
, where , these rules are described in the
following way:
1) Logical-OR fusion rule(LO)
LO rule is worked as follows : Mathematically, Let G
denote the decision rule statistic in the BS, it can be described
as

(16)
Assuming that all decisions are independent, the
probability of detection and probability of false alarm of the
cooperative spectrum sensing for Logical OR fusion over
Rayleigh fading channels are given by, respectively,

(17)

(18)
2) Logical-AND fusion rule(LA)
LA rule is worked as follows : Mathematically, Let G
denote the decision rule statistic in the BS, it can be described
as

(19)
Assuming that all decisions are independent, the
probability of detection and probability of false alarm of the
cooperative spectrum sensing for Logical LA fusion over
Rayleigh fading channels are given by, respectively,

(20)

(21)
where

and

are the probabilities of detection

and false-alarm over Rayleigh fading channels as dened by
(15) and (16) respectively, Let denote the number of users
cooperative [17] and [20].
V. SIMULATION STUDY
Simulation was done on MATLAB over Rayleigh channel.
and what interests us in this simulation, is the receiver
performance. Thus, the receiver operating characteristic
(ROC) curves (Pd vs Pf ) or complementary ROC curves (Pm
vs Pf ) of the energy detection for one cognitive radio are
plotted for different SNR values according to (14) and (15).
Fig. 5 shows the variation of the

Vs

for
different values, and a time bandwidth factor .
These curves illustrate the impact of the on the

.
More the increases, more

have good results. For

example when equal 5dB with the

= 0.03998 the

is equal 0.7602 but when the SNR = 20dB with the

same

, the

is equal 0.9129.
Fig. 6 shows the ROC of spectrum sensing for different
over Rayleigh channel. This simulation was carried out
for the analysis of detection probability under different values
of taken between 5dB and 95dB, where

=
0.001388 and time bandwidth factor .
Table. I shows that performance of detection varies based
on, and increasing makes the detection also
increased. Then probability is approximately good for
from 70 to 95dB as shown in Table. I.

Fig. 5. Pd Ray VS Pfa Ray,-ROC of spectrum sensing for different SNR
(no cooperative)

Fig. 6. Pd Ray VS SNR - ROC of spectrum sensing for different SNR (no
cooperative)
TABLE I. SNR AND DETECTION PROBABILITY

5 0.8315 55 0.9873
10 0.9284 60 0.9883
15 0.9523 65 0.9892
20 0.9648 70 0.99
25 0.9719 75 0.9907
30 0.9766 80 0.9913
35 0.98 85 0.9918
40 0.9825 90 0.9922
45 0.9844 95 0.9926
50 0.986

In the following, the performance of cooperative spectrum
sensing with various decision fusion rules is presented by
different simulations.
0.0385 0.039 0.0395 0.04 0.0405 0.041 0.0415 0.042 0.0425
0.7
0.75
0.8
0.85
0.9
0.95
1
Pfa Ray : Probability of Fals alarm over Rayleigh fading channel
P
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0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
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SNR: Signal to Noise Ratio (dB)
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Fig. 7 shows the variation of the

with

for different values, with logical rule OR

also provided for in the case L = 3 as given in Fig. 4.
One has proved that the cooperative detection of spectrum
can considerably increase the probability of detection in
fading environment with different values.
The results represented with the rule OR is more powerful
in comparison to the rule AND, These results are shown in
Fig. 7 and Fig. 8.

Fig. 7. QD,ORRay VS Qfa,ORRay-Performance of cooperation spectrum
sensing over Rayleigh fading channels Logical OR rule

Fig. 8. QD,AND Ray VS Qfa,AND Ray-Performance of cooperation
spectrum sensing over Rayleigh fading channels Logical AND rule
Results indicate an improvement of the probability for
detection, as given in Fig. 9. More the number of users
increases, more the probability of detection have good results,
starting from ,one notes that the probability of
detection cooperative is equal 1.
Fig.10 shows. Performance of cooperative spectrum
sensing over Rayleigh fading channels Logical OR rule for
different SNR. This simulation was carried out for the analysis
of cooperative spectrum sensing for Logic-OR fusion rule
under different values of SNR taken between 5dB and 35 dB,
where

= 0.001388 and time bandwidth factor

Table. II Shows that performance of detection cooperative
varies based on SNR, and SNR increasing makes the detection
also increased. Then probability is approximately good for
SNR from 5 to 30 dB as shown in Table. II, starting
from , one notes that the probability of
detection cooperative is equal 1.

Fig. 9. QD,OR Ray Vs L-Performance of cooperative spectrumsensing
with Logical OR rule for diferent number users collaborating

Fig. 10. QD,OR Ray Vs SNR-Performance of cooperative spectrumsensing
with Logical OR rule for diferent SNR
TABLE II. SNR AND DETECTION COOPERATIVE PROBABILITY

5 0.9917
0.111 0.112 0.113 0.114 0.115 0.116 0.117 0.118 0.119 0.12
0.975
0.98
0.985
0.99
0.995
1
1.005
Qfa,OR Ray : Probability of Fals alarm over Rayleigh fading channel
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L=3users and SNR= 20 @ Logical OR
L=3users and SNR=15 @ Logical OR
L=3users and SNR=10 @ Logical OR
L=3users and SNR=5 @ Logical OR
5.6 5.8 6 6.2 6.4 6.6 6.8 7 7.2 7.4
x 10
-5
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Qfa,OR Ray : Probability of Fals alarm over Rayleigh fading channel
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L=3users and SNR= 20 @ Logical AND
L=3users and SNR=15 @ Logical AND
L=3users and SNR=10 @ Logical AND
L=3users and SNR=5 @ Logical AND
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
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L : number of users collaborating
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SNR= 5 dB and pf=0.03853 @ Logical OR
5 10 15 20 25 30 35
0.991
0.992
0.993
0.994
0.995
0.996
0.997
0.998
0.999
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1.001
SNR : Signal to Noise Ratio (dB)
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L=3 users and pf = 0.001 @ Logical OR
10 0.999
15 0.9997
20 0.9999
25 0.9999
30 1
35 1
40 1

VI. CONCLUSION
With the increasing demand for radio spectrum, it is
noticed that the use of the spectrum is ineffective one term of
resource. Cognitive radio can efficiently utilize the spectrum
of the licensed bands in different times, location and
frequency. One of the important elements of cognitive radio is
spectrum sensing. In this paper, we dissect the Energy
Detection technique and we have concluded that the Energy
Detection plays a big role in the spectrum sensing. We have
investigated in detail this technique of detection that may be
used as a starting point for future research. The performance
of energy detection in cognitive radio systems over Rayleigh
channel has been studied by MATLAB simulation. The results
of this study show that the detection probability depends on
the Signal to noise ratio (SNR) and the SNR increasing leads
to higher detection probability. Another study show that the
probability of detection increases not only with the SNR but
also with the co-operation between the secondary users, thus
cooperative detection depends on the number of user and we
may refer the number of user as a gain to improve the
probability of detection in fading environment. Currently, the
researches on the cognitive radio are based mainly with
several axis : the detection of the free resources, the dynamic
distribution of the frequencies between terminals RC and the
mobility of a terminal RC (spectral handover).
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