Double-Threshold Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Algorithm Based on Sevcik Fractal Dimension

Spectrum sensing is of great importance in the cognitive radio (CR) networks. Compared with individual spectrum sensing, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) has been shown to greatly improve the accuracy of the detection. However, the existing CSS algorithms are sensitive to noise uncertainty and are inaccurate in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) detection. To address this, we propose a double-threshold CSS algorithm based on Sevcik fractal dimension (SFD) in this paper. The main idea of the presented scheme is to sense the presence of primary users in the local spectrum sensing by analyzing different characteristics of the SFD between signals and noise. Considering the stochastic fluctuation characteristic of the noise SFD in a certain range, we adopt the double-threshold method in the multi-cognitive user CSS so as to improve the detection accuracy, where thresholds are set according to the maximum and minimum values of the noise SFD. After obtaining the detection results, the cognitive user sends local detection results to the fusion center for reliability fusion. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is insensitive to noise uncertainty. Simulations also show that the algorithm presented in this paper can achieve high detection performance at the low SNR region.