Linear Soft Combination for Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this letter, we study the cooperative energy-based combination for spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks. Linear combination rule is investigated to minimize the probability of missed detection subject to an upper limit on the probability of false alarm. We propose a novel and practical linear combination rule, which only requires the mean and variance of the local test statistics. The performance of the proposed combination rule is verified in three typical fading scenarios: the slow fading, the block fading, and the fast fading. Simulations show that the proposed strategy has nearly the same performance as the optimal likelihood-ratio test approaches, and outperforms the conventional linear combination methods.