Sensing Performance Evaluation over Multihop System with Composite Fading Channel

Cognitive radio has been demonstrated for improved spectrum utilization by secondary users in the presence of spectrum holes. In this paper, a Cognitive Radio (CR) network is implemented over the cooperative multihop wireless link. A multihop network is a collection of relay nodes within transmitter and receiver. A fixed infrastructure based multihop architecture is assumed for the performance analysis of energy detection algorithm for spectrum sensing in CR. System performance estimation against channel impairments dominated by fading and shadowing effects is one of the prerequisite for performance analysis of such networks. An effort has been made for exact performance analysis of multihop wireless network over composite fading channels. The investigation lead to the findings i.e., for a given value of fading or shadowing parameter, the preferable detection probability is always dependent upon the optimum number of hops. Depending upon SNR a threeor fivehop link may perform better. For severe fading conditions, the one-hop link performs best.