A Comparative Study of Cooperative and Non-cooperative Wideband Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks for 5g Applications

The rapid advancements in 5G technologies have created an unprecedented need for efficient spectrum utilization to support increasing data traffic and diverse communication services. In this context, accurate and reliable spectrum sensing is essential. This study explores wideband spectrum sensing strategies, comparing non-cooperative cognitive radio (CR) techniques with cooperative methods across multiple subbands. A novel cooperative wideband spectrum sensing framework was developed, incorporating a K-outof-N fusion rule at the fusion center to make optimal decisions by selecting an appropriate K for a given number of cooperating CRs. This approach addresses noise uncertainty, a common challenge in traditional non-cooperative energy detection methods, particularly in 5G environments under Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) conditions, assumed to be identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.). However, while cooperative sensing significantly improves detection in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios with higher false alarm rates (between 0.5 and 1), our findings reveal that it does not consistently outperform non-cooperative methods at very low false alarm rates (0.01 and 0.1) under poor SNR conditions. These findings highlight the need for further research to enhance cooperative sensing strategies for various operational environments.