Efficient Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in UAV-Assisted Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In order to meet the frequency requirements of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), sensors assist UAVs in cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) to identify available spectrum resources and opportunistically access the channel being underutilized by the primary user (PU). However, in such a UAV-assisted cognitive wireless sensor network (CWSN), the cooperative mode among multiple UAVs with built-in sensors may incur high overhead costs, resulting in the spectrum sensing performance degradation. Therefore, we introduce a differential sequential 1, which incorporates a differential mechanism and leverages the sequential idea based on the classical voting rule to enhance the CSS performance and efficiency. In view of this, we formulate three scenarios to characterize the PU activity and introduce a multislot cooperative mode within a single UAV with built-in sensor to realize cooperative gain. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the superiority of our proposal with respect to the detection performance and sample size is evident.