Cooperative Spectrum Sensing over Fading Channel in Cognitive Radio

Spectrum sensing is the key component of cognitive radio technology. Spectrum sensing is a tough task because of shadowing, fading, and time-varying nature of wireless channels. However, detection is compromised when a user experiences shadowing or fading effects. In such cases, user cannot distinguish between an unused band and a deep fade. Thus, cooperative spectrum sensing is proposed to optimize the sensing performance. We focus performance of cooperative spectrum sensing over Rayleigh and Nakagami fading channel with comparable non-fading AWGN channel in cognitive radio. This paper presents a simulation comparison of these fading channels based on fusion rule OR-rule, AND-rule and MAJORITY-rule. We observe that spectrum sensing is harder in presence of Rayleigh and Nakagami fading and performance of energy detection degrades more in Nakagami channels than Rayleigh channel and non-fading AWGN channel.