Description

Radio spectrum sensing (SS) has been an active topic of research over the past years due to its importance to cognitive radio (CR) systems. However, in CR networks (CRNs) with multiple primary users (PUs), the secondary users (SUs) can often detect PUs that are located outside the sensing range, due to the level of the aggregated interference caused by the PUs. This effect, known as spatial false alarm (SFA), degrades the performance of CRNs because it decreases the SUs’ medium access probability. This paper characterizes the SFA effect in a CRN, identifying possible actions to attenuate it.