Decision Fusion of Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio under Bandwidth Constraints

Cooperative spectrum sensing among cognitive radio nodes is needed in order to overcome fading and shadowing effects on individual cognitive user and to increase the reliability and efficiency of spectrum sensing. When communication is under bandwidth constraint, spectrum sensing sensor nodes normally only send one bit report to fusion center and censoring detection method is employed by sensor nodes. However only conventional fusion rules are considered and the "No decision" information by censoring sensor nodes is disregarded by recent research work. Actually the "No decision" message can be known by fusion center during their signaling process. By analytical results and numerical computation, we demonstrate that the censoring fusion scheme which incorporates "No decision" message for decision fusion can significantly outdo conventional fusion rules on the improvement of the detection performance of spectrum sensing.