Performance Evaluation Metric for Cooperative Sensing in Heterogeneous Radio Environments

Abstract:
Spectrum sensing is a major task for wireless devices in order to improve coexistence among them in heterogeneous radio environments. Wireless communication includes at least two partners: transmitter and receiver. Therefore, cooperation between partners can improve the performance of spectrum sensing by reducing effort, improving sensing result or a combination of both. An optimal cooperative sensing scheme is a first step to achieve complete awareness of the radio environment for wireless devices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical work performed in order to understand the problem of developing optimal cooperative sensing schemes for heterogeneous radio environments for multiple users and single channel. We analyze the problem and perform analytical work which results in a cooperative sensing model. The model comprises sensing schedule, data fusion rules, PU’s traffic pattern, and detection performance of the sensing device. A new performance evaluation metric is introduced for optimum spectrum sensing in heterogeneous radio environments. An evaluation of available exemplary cooperative sensing schemes shows that none provides optimality in all scenarios. Index Terms — Cooperative MAC; Performance Evaluation Metric; Spectrum Sensing; Heterogeneous Radio Environment