Joint cooperative spectrum sensing and channel selection optimization for satellite communication systems based on cognitive radio

Cognitive radio has attracted considerable attention because of its ability to make full use of the available spectrum resources for wireless terrestrial communication networks. In addition, the satellite communication scenario, which requires a transparent air interface to integrated/hybrid Satellite–Terrestrial communication systems and provides a supplement for other multimedia services, will cause frequency scarcity. Satellite communication systems based on cognitive radio are available under scenarios that involve transmission with changing communications. In this paper, a cooperative spectrum‐sensing algorithm based on a time or bandwidth‐based cooperative spectrum‐sensing model of an integrated/hybrid cooperative satellite communication system is proposed. Moreover, the concept of weighted cooperative spectrum sensing is introduced. Compared with the traditional single‐user spectrum‐sensing algorithm, the cooperative spectrum sensing is able to cope with the interference to the primary user caused by a secondary user better. In addition, multiple earth stations that use some part of the bandwidth cooperatively to perform spectrum sensing throughout the whole frame can detect the presence of primary user in time. The satellite component combines the sensing results from earth stations to reach a final decision, and the optimal combination weights to maximize the detection probability of the secondary user are obtained. Numerical results that demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm are presented. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.