Cooperative Spectrum Sensing: A Blind and Soft Fusion Detector

Cooperative spectrum sensing has been studied to combat the hidden terminal problem by exploiting the spatial diversity in cognitive radio (CR) networks. This paper concerns blind cooperative spectrum sensing with soft fusion, where the a priori knowledge of channels and primary signals is unavailable, and soft information is transmitted from each secondary user (SU) to a fusion center for detection. We first introduce the Quade test to design a blind detector. Then, a new detector with both lower computational complexity and lower overhead is derived, where only the estimated power and the variance of the instantaneous power at each SU are required at the fusion center. The analytical expressions for the detection performance, in terms of false-alarm probability and detection probability, are derived for the proposed detector. Simulation results are provided to validate the theoretical analyses and demonstrate the superior performance of proposed detector compared to the state-of-the-art detectors. It is also shown that, with the increase of the number of hidden terminals in the CR, the proposed detector can maintain high detection performance while the conventional detectors exhibit rapid performance degradation.