Unified analysis of cooperative spectrum sensing over generalized multipath fading channels

The present work is devoted to the analytic performance evaluation of cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) over generalized fading channels. The proposed analysis is based on the efficient Gaussian-Finite-Mixture (GFM) that allows the derivation of a simple and accurate closed-form expression for the average probability of energy detection (ED) under different fading environments. Capitalizing on this, we derive generalized closed-form expressions for the global probabilities of detection for the CSS with two main hard centralized fusion rules, namely, the AND and the OR rules. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed expressions is justified by comparing the corresponding complementary receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for both multipath and composite multipath/shadowing fading channels, which are otherwise particularly difficult to obtain. The offered analytic results are corroborated by respective results from computer simulations and it is shown that the corresponding performance depends significantly on both the severity of fading and the involved number of users in the collaborative network.