Multi-channel Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Based on Belief Propagation Algorithm

Multi-channel spectrum sensing is prevailing but also very challenging in wideband cognitive radio systems. Conventional multi-channel spectrum detection such as channel-by-channel scan costs much time and energy. This paper aims to show a novel multi-user cooperative spectrum sensing method which can reduce the sensing ability requirement for secondary users while still guaranteeing the sensing accuracy and effectiveness in a multi-channel cognitive radio context. In our proposed method, each cognitive user chooses an Ideal-Soliton-Distributed number of channels to sense, and the partial detection results are then passed to a confusion center which uses a specially designed Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm to infer the spectrum activities of all the channels. A heuristic method to release the detected channels from the whole spectrum bands is also proposed to reduce the sensing complexity further. Simulation results show that the proposed sensing methods can obtain excellent performance.