Cooperative Spectrum Sensing with Random Access Reporting Channels in Cognitive Radio Networks

In cognitive radio (CR) networks, cooperative spectrum sensing is utilized to improve the sensing performance to avoid potential interference to primary users (PUs) and increase spectrum access opportunities for secondary users (SUs). A cooperative spectrum sensing process is divided into three phases: individual sensing/detection, reporting/fusion, and data transmission. In the reporting phase, one or more reporting channels are needed to transmit individual sensing results to a fusion center (FC), and global spectrum sensing results are determined at the FC. The number of required reporting channels depends on the number of spectrum sensors or SUs, which relates to reporting channel efficiency and channel scheduling complexity. That is to say, the reporting channel design can be a challenge, especially when fixed assignment scheduling is used. Therefore, in this paper, we design a reporting channel scheme based on random access protocols, including slotted Aloha and reservation-Aloha. Performance evaluations in terms of PU detection probabilities and false alarm probabilities considering the proposed reporting channels are presented. In addition, the impact of soft/unquantized spectrum sensors or detectors (SUs) and malicious SUs is considered in this paper. Analytical and simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed reporting channel scheduling methods in improving the cooperative spectrum sensing performance.