Effect of Clusters in Energy-Efficient Cooperative White Space Detection in a Cognitive Radio System

White Space Detection (WSD) is a core operation in a Cognitive Radio System (CRS) to identify idle spectrum for maximum utilization. However, WSD is often affected by multipath effects resulting in poor detection rate. Cooperative WSD (CWSD) which is one of the existing techniques used to address the problem is characterized by long sensing time, energy and bandwidth inefficiency. Energy-Efficient CWSD (EECWSD) was proposed in previous work to solve the problem associated with CWSD. Hence, in this paper, the effect of clusters in EECWSD is carried out with Radiometry Detector (RD). The investigation is carried out using multiple clusters and each cluster contained multiple Secondary Users (SUs). The SUs are used to perform local sensing and the sensing results are combined at individual cluster using majority fusion rule. The sensing results from individual cluster are combined to obtain global sensing result using OR fusion rule. The system is simulated using MATLAB software. The system is evaluated using Probability of Detection (PD), Total Error Probability (TEP), Spectral Efficiency (SE) and Sensing Time (ST). At SNR of 20 dB, PD values of 0.7890, 0.8376 and 0.8787 are obtained for clusters 3, 4 and 5, respectively, while the corresponding TEP values are 0.2210, 0.1724 and 0.1313 for clusters 3, 4 and 5, respectively. At SNR of 16 dB, 13.2594 and 16.4341 are the SE values obtained for clusters 3 and 5, respectively, while the corresponding ST values obtained are 4.2487 and 2.6177 s for clusters 3 and 5, respectively. The results obtained revealed that, PD and SE increase as number of cluster increases, while ST and TEP reduce as cluster increases.  Keywords — Cognitive Radio, White Space, Spectrum Sensing, Probability of Detection, Spectral Efficiency.