A sequential cooperative spectrum sensing scheme based on cognitive user reputation

The spectrum sensing plays an essential role in Cognitive Radio (CR), which enables opportunistic access to underutilized licensed spectrums. Cooperative spectrum sensing can help improve sensing performance. However, when the number of cognitive users is large, the latency and network traffic for reporting sensing results to the Fusion Center (FC) become extremely large, which may result in an extended sensing time and collision in the control channel between Cognitive Users (CUs) and the FC. In this paper, we propose an extended Sequential Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (SCSS) scheme in which the reputation of individual CU is used to ensure that the FC efficiently collects local sensing data from CUs. The proposed scheme reduces the number of sensing reports required while improving sensing performance in comparison with the conventional SCSS scheme even when few malicious users exist in the network.