Unified Analysis of Cooperative Spectrum Sensing over Composite and Generalized Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) with multiple antenna nodes over composite and generalized fading channels. We model the probability density function (PDF) of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) using the mixture gamma (MG) distribution. We then derive a generalized closed-form expression for the probability of energy detection, which can be used efficiently for generalized multipath as well as composite (multipath and shadowing) fading channels. The composite effect of fading and shadowing scenarios in CSS is mitigated by applying an optimal fusion rule that minimizes the total error rate (TER), where the optimal number of nodes is derived under the Bayesian criterion, assuming erroneous feedback channels. For imperfect feedback channels, we demonstrate the existence of a TER floor as the number of antennas of the CR nodes increases. Accordingly, we derive the optimal rule for the number of antennas that minimizes the TER. Numerical and Monte-Carlo simulations are presented to corroborate the analytical results and to provide illustrative performance comparisons between different composite fading channels.