A low complexity cooperative spectrum sensing scheme for cognitive radios

Conventional distributed cognitive radio (CR) communication aims to increase the sensing accuracy and reduce the detection time by allowing the CR users to operate in the same frequency band in a cooperative fashion and by forming efficient decision making. In this paper, we propose a spectrum sensing scheme which provides low complexity accurate detection by assigning different sensing tasks to the CRs. In our method, with N cooperative CRs, an effective sensing resolution of N times higher than that of a single CR is achieved. An inherently low complex reconfigurable progressive decimation filter bank is used at each CR. The hardware complexity of our sensing scheme is more than N times lower than that of the conventional spectrum sensor.