Novel quantization‐based spectrum sensing scheme under imperfect reporting channel and false reports

In this paper, a novel sensing scheme, uniform quantization for cooperative sensing (UniQCS), that employs a uniform quantizer is proposed. UniQCS is based on energy detection and uses weight vector for global decision function. It performs better than hard decision algorithms such as majority and k‐out‐of‐n in terms of probability of detection and false alarm at the cost of a marginal increase in overhead bits under imperfect reporting channel and false reports. The probability of detection is maximized for a given probability of false alarm constraint by the proposed method. For detailed analysis, the UniQCS is compared with equal gain combiner scheme, which performs far better than hard decision algorithms, via highest bandwidth requirement. The proposed algorithm performs close to equal gain combiner. Moreover, the robustness of UniQCS to sensing error is analyzed when some nodes always report false decisions to the fusion center and the reporting channel is imperfect. For probability of false alarm equal to 0.01, performance gain of UniQCS is at least 45% compared with the other methods when there are two false reporting nodes. UniQCS performance gain is at least 15% compared with other methods for probability of reporting channel error equal to 0.001. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.