A Low Complexity High Resolution Cooperative Spectrum-Sensing Scheme for Cognitive Radios

Conventional distributed cognitive radio (CR) communication aims to increase the sensing accuracy and reduce the detection time by allowing the CR users to operate in the same frequency band in a cooperative fashion and by forming efficient decision making. In this paper, we propose a spectrum-sensing scheme which provides accurate detection at low complexity, by assigning different sensing tasks to the CRs. If the number of cooperative CRs is N, our method offers an effective sensing resolution of N times higher than that of the conventional method. An inherently low complex progressive decimation filter bank, which provides variable sensing resolutions by software reconfiguration, is employed at each CR. The design example shows that the hardware complexity of our sensing scheme is 41.3% less than that of the conventional spectrum sensor. It is also shown that the proposed system can support multiple communication standards.