Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) technology is proposed to resolve the conflict between massive spectrum underutilization and the impending spectrum scarcity. One of the promising implementations of this paradigm is Cognitive Radio (CR), which enables Secondary Users (SUs) to opportunistically access frequency bands which have been exclusively allocated to Primary Users (PUs) without introducing harmful interference to the communication process of PUs....[ Read more ]

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) technology is proposed to resolve the conflict between massive spectrum underutilization and the impending spectrum scarcity. One of the promising implementations of this paradigm is Cognitive Radio (CR), which enables Secondary Users (SUs) to opportunistically access frequency bands which have been exclusively allocated to Primary Users (PUs) without introducing harmful interference to the communication process of PUs.

The dramatic growth of wireless applications leads to tremendous boost in the volume of communication traffic as well as the associated energy consumption. As a promising technology to implement DSA, CR is also envisioned to evolve to be energy efficient.

Cooperative spectrum sensing, which can profoundly improve the ability of discovering the spectrum opportunities, is regarded as an enabling mechanism for Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). One of the most fundamental problems in cooperative spectrum sensing is how to assign SUs to sense different primary channels such that SUs can achieve a good balance between sensing accuracy and the exploration of potential spectrum holes.

In this thesis, the Cooperative Sensing Scheduling (CSS) problem for CRN is analyzed by taking both the performance and energy consumption of spectrum sensing into consideration. The CSS problem is investigated in the following three scenarios: (1) Both SUs and primary channels have homogeneous characteristics. (2) PU channels are heterogeneous in terms of channel protection criteria, channel idle probabilities and channel capacities while SUs possess identical sensing capability. (3) PU channels are heterogeneous in terms of channel protection criteria, channel idle probabilities and channel capacities, and SUs also have heterogeneous sensing capability. By analyzing the problem under the discrete-convex framework, efficient algorithms are proposed and numerical results are also presented to validate the analysis.