Spectrum sensing performance evaluation of bi-threshold detector in Rayleigh and Rician fading environments

With recent advances in wireless applications like multimedia applications & rich Web services, spectrum scarcity is increasing with every passing day. The scarcity of spectrum is not due to its rareness; it is mainly due to its inefficient utilization. Cognitive radio is a promising solution to this problem. It is, ideally, an intelligent radio which senses the spectrum and opportunistically transmits if the sensed band happens to be idle. Spectrum sensing by far is the issue of paramount importance in cognitive radio realm. Many schemes have been proposed for spectrum sensing, but still there is a lot of room for efficient algorithms. One of the demerits of the past research work on spectrum sensing is that if some algorithm decreases the number of sensing bits to the central receiver then the sensing performance is also degraded simultaneously. This study mainly focuses on comparing the performance of a censoring method to decrease the bandwidth of control channel in Rayleigh and Rician fading channels.