Spectrum sensing via reconfigurable antennas: Is cooperation of secondary users indispensable?

This work presents an analytical framework for characterizing the performance of cooperative and non-cooperative spectrum sensing schemes by figuring out the tradeoff between the achieved diversity and coding gains in each scheme. Based on this analysis, we try to answer the fundamental question: can we dispense with SUs cooperation and still achieve an arbitrary diversity gain? It is shown that this is indeed possible via a novel technique that can offer diversity gain for a single SU using a single antenna. The technique is based on the usage of a reconfigurable antenna that changes its propagation characteristics over time, thus creating an artificial temporal diversity. It is shown that the usage of reconfigurable antennas outperforms cooperative as well as non-cooperative schemes at low and high Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs). Moreover, if the channel state information is available at the SU, an additional SNR gain can also be achieved.