Author : Anita Sharma, Swarn Ahuja and Moin Uddin

For cognitive radio networks, it has been proven that cooperative spectrum sensing is more reliable and efficient as far as detecting spectrum holes in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is concerned. It does this by combining sensing information of multiple cognitive radio users. Cooperative spectrum sensing has been known to greatly improve the detection range and capability through exploitation of the inherent spatial diversity in cooperative relaying strategies. In implementing cooperative relay based energy detection, data fusion and decision fusion are the two major approaches have been identified in literature. Although the notion of cooperative relay based data fusion has been well discussed in literature, in this paper, we study different aspects of fusion and the different schemes that can be implemented in fusion center. Also a brief introduction about malicious attacks that a cooperative cognitive radio network can suffer from and methods to combat them are given at the end of the paper.

Keywords: Cooperative spectrum sensing, cognitive radio network (CRN), data fusion, soft, quantized and hard fusion rules, denial of service (DoS), incumbent emulation(IE) or primary user emulation attack(PUEA), security, spectrum sensing data falsification(SSDF)

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.4,No.3 (June- 2014)