Spectrum Sensing for Optical Wireless Scattering Communications Over Málaga Fading-A Cooperative Approach With Hard Decision Fusion

This paper presents collaborative spectrum sensing for optical wireless scattering communications. The received signal is characterized by the conditional Poisson distribution, given the mean photon count following Málaga distributed correlated fading. We consider multi-scattered non-coplanar links and use the stochastic analytical method to model the channel. A system model is developed, utilizing the cooperative diversity drawn from the fact that the users are randomly distributed. A novel centralized cooperative spectrum sensing technique is developed that all the raw data available at each collaborative user are combined at the fusion center to make a decision. Another novel decentralized technique is also proposed where only one-bit information is required to be sent to the fusion center. For this decentralized technique, we propose a unique voting rule that leverages the location flexibility of randomly distributed users with each user experiencing correlated fading. Results demonstrate their effectiveness and provide insights into the proposed cooperative spectrum sensing system. Interestingly, it is also found that the use of the proposed voting rule requires fewer than the total number of collaborative users while satisfying a given error rate, and yields the Bernoulli distributed output of the fusion center.