Energy-efficient cooperative spectrum sensing and transmission in multi-channel cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we consider a cognitive radio network (CRN) with multiple primary users (PUs) and multiple SUs and propose a cooperative spectrum sensing and transmission for some selected SUs in order to avoid interference with PUs. The distributed collaboration strategy is done through a coalitional game and we present a distributed algorithm for the coalition formation. In the proposed scheme, the SUs that sense a particular channel with non-identical sensing times, form a coalition in which a coalition head is selected to determine whether or not the channel is idle. If a channel is not active, then the SU chosen as coalition head can transmit its packets through a cooperative scheme in the data transmission slot. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the average throughput compared to its non-cooperative counterpart. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed scheme is energy efficient in comparison to a scheme with fixed and identical sensing times.