SNR wall and cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio under noise uncertainty

Cooperative energy spectrum sensing has been proved effective to detect the spectrum holes in Cognitive Radio (CR). However, its performance may suffer from the noise uncertainty, which is portrayed by the SNR wall in some literatures. In this paper we analyze the spectrum sensing performance under noise uncertainty and find an alternative approach to obtain the SNR wall. Then the average SNR wall is proposed to illustrate the statistically average impact of noise uncertainty. In addition, the cooperative sensing performance under noise uncertainty with AND rule is discussed. Analyses and numerical results show that cooperative sensing can significantly improve the sensing performance under the condition of noise uncertainty.