Performance analysis of soft decision spectrum sensing based on multi-bit quantization

In cognitive radio networks, soft decision spectrum sensing process the statistical measurement values sent by cognitive users through control channels in cognitive base station, and determine the activity of primary users. Owing to the limited bandwidth of the control channel, cognitive users shall quantify the statistical measurement values before sending it to cognitive base station. This paper put forwards the soft decision spectrum sensing based on multi-bit quantization, and analyzes the sensing performance of the algorithm in different quantization bits. Meantime the algorithm takes the quantization errors into account, and establishes the closed form expression for the detection performance. Simulation results show that the sensing performance of the soft decision spectrum sensing is very close to the performance without quantization when the number of quantization bits are great than four.