Cooperative Spectrum Sensing With Noncoherent Transmission

The problem of decision fusion for cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks is studied when noisy fading channels are present between the Cognitive Radios (CRs) and the Fusion Center (FC). The CRs perform spectrum sensing using energy detection and transmit their binary decisions to the FC for a final decision on the absence or presence of the primary user activity. Considering the limited resources in cognitive radio networks, which makes it difficult to acquire the instantaneous channel state information, non-coherent transmission schemes with On-Off Keying (OOK) and Binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK) are employed to transmit the binary decisions to the fusion center.