Performance enhancing techniques in cognitive radio networks

An important functionality of cognitive radio network is spectrum sensing. It is performed to determine the idle frequency bands that are not being occupied by a licensed primary user at that particular time. Even though cooperative spectrum sensing is found to be highly reliable compared with single user sensing, increased energy consumption is a notable drawback. Various methods and algorithms have been proposed so far to improve and maintain energy efficiency in the network. This paper gives a brief description about cooperative spectrum sensing and the various techniques followed in the existing works to improve the network performance and conserve energy.