Performance Comparison of Cooperative and Distributed Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio

TL;DR

This paper compares cooperative and distributed spectrum sensing strategies in wireless sensor networks, analyzing their performance in terms of agility, energy efficiency, and robustness to SNR variations.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of cooperative and distributed spectrum sensing strategies, highlighting their respective advantages and trade-offs.

Findings

Cooperative sensing offers the best agility.

Distributed sensing achieves the lowest energy consumption.

Non-cooperative sensing provides the best fairness in energy use.

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the performances of cooperative and distributed spectrum sensing in wireless sensor networks. After introducing the basic problem, we describe two strategies: 1) a cooperative sensing strategy, which takes advantage of cooperation diversity gain to increase probability of detection and 2) a distributed sensing strategy, which by passing the results in an inter-node manner increases energy efficiency and fairness among nodes. Then, we compare the performances of the strategies in terms of three criteria: agility, energy efficiency, and robustness against SNR changes, and summarize the comparison. It shows that: 1) the non-cooperative strategy has the best fairness of energy consumption, 2) the cooperative strategy leads to the best agility, and 3) the distributed strategy leads to the lowest energy consumption and the best robustness against SNR changes.