Abstract: | As is well known, cooperative sensing can remarkably improve the sensing accuracy by exploiting the spatial diversity of different secondary users. However, a large number of cooperative secondary users reporting their local decisions would induce great detection delay and traffic burden, which degrades the performance of secondary spectrum access. This paper proposes an intelligent cooperative sensing (ICS) strategy with selective reporting and sequential detection to enhance the sensing reliability as well as reduce the sensing overhead for cognitive radios. The tradeoff in the sensing time allocation is studied for ICS and then two novel fusion rules are developed to efficiently obtain the optimum sensing time allocation with different objectives. The performance of ICS is analyzed in terms of miss detection probability and average sensing time, where their closed‐form expressions are derived over Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results reveal that ICS achieves higher sensing reliability with less sensing overhead than the traditional strategy. It is also shown that the miss detection probability and average sensing time of ICS can be minimized by optimizing the sensing time allocation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |