Enhancement of Performance of Cognitive Radio Network with Incorporation of MRC Scheme at Secondary Receiver

Abstract—The faithful detection of presence of a primary user (PU) is the most essential requirement of a cognitive radio network. Otherwise the PU will experience jamming from a secondary user (SU) which will eventually lead to reduction in throughput of the PU. Similarly, the false detection of a PU will abstain a SU from its transmission opportunity hence reduce the throughput of the SU. Under this situation we propose a cognitive receiver equipped with multiple antenna and maximal ratio combining scheme (MRC) to detect the presence of a PU. The rest of the communication links like PU to PU or SU to PU uses single antenna. In this paper the concept of test statistics of fusion center from a previous literature is applied in the derivation of the probability of false alarm, probability of detection, channel capacity and symbol error rate of the network. The performance of a cognitive radio network under MRC scheme at receiving mode of SU is found better than the case of a single antenna.