Abstract
In cognitive radios, secondary users can use the spectrum exclusively allocated to a primary wireless system if the secondary users detect the spectrum in idle states. Because the secondary users can utilize the idle state of the spectrum, the utilization rate of the spectrum can be improved. The idle states can be detected by using secondary users' sensing schemes. However, the wireless channel environment where secondary users perform the spectrum sensing is not very friendly to secondary users because the signal-to-noise ratio of the received primary signal is very low. Hence, cooperative sensing scheme where more than one secondary user take part in the spectrum sensing is generally used in cognitive radios. In this paper, we investigate the cooperative sensing performance for machine-to-machine communication devices operated by batteries with limited energy. In general, the energy consumed for the spectrum sensing increases as the length of the sensing period and the number of cooperative sensing nodes. Accordingly, even though the total amount of the consumed energy is the same, an energy allocation methodology how to distribute the energy to the sensing period and sensing nodes can achieve the optimum sensing performance, which is numerically analyzed.
