Selection of cognitive radios for cooperative sensing

Cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio (CR) networks has been widely studied to increase the reliability of the primary user detection. However, when there are a large number of cooperating CRs, this typically leads to an increase in overhead in sensing reporting as well as in sensing report combining. A large number of CRs participating in cooperative spectrum sensing also increases the overall energy consumption of the CR network. One recent line of research has examined sensor selection techniques, in which a subset of the CRs is selected to perform the cooperative spectrum sensing in order to reduce overhead and save network energy. However, selection of such a subset is challenging as we do not know a priori which of the CRs have the best detection performance. We present a literature review of CR selection techniques for hard decision cooperative sensing and also perform novel analysis for simple counting (SC) CR selection method.