Spectrum sensing scheduling for group spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks

This paper addresses the issues on spectrum sharing in a cognitive radio network consisting of a primary user and a group of cognitive users. Each cognitive user may occupy a non-overlapped sub-band of the primary spectrum, but it needs to perform spectrum sensing independently before accessing the sub-band. To reduce the complexity of spectrum sensing and thus energy consumption, this paper proposes a scheduled spectrum sensing scheme. First, we consider a single spectrum sensing scenario where only one cognitive user is elected to perform spectrum sensing, and then it broadcasts its sensing results to the other cognitive users. The scheduled spectrum sensing scheme works in both network-centric and user-centric ways. Next, the scheduled spectrum sensing scheme is further generalized to work in a multiple spectrum sensing scenario. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes compared with the traditional schemes where all cognitive users may perform spectrum sensing at the same time.