Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) has been verified as an effective approach to improve the sensing performances of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Compared with existing works that commonly consider fusion with fixed inputs and neglect the duration of the reporting period in the design, we novelly investigate a fundamental trade-off among three periods of CSS: sensing, reporting, and transmission periods, and evaluate the impact of the fusion rule with a varying number of local sensing results. To be specific, the sensing time could be traded for additional mini-slots to report more local sensing results for fusion, or it could be traded for longer transmission time. In the CRNs with a given durations of sensing/reporting/transmission periods, we, respectively, formulate the throughput and collision probability and optimize the throughput under the collision constraint. The theoretical results show that, in the specific value intervals of the sensing parameters, the collision constraint provides an upper bound of the number of mini-slots in the reporting period or a lower bound of the sensing duration. We provide the approach to the maximum throughput in some cases.Finally, numerical results are presented to validate theoretical results.
Keywords: cognitive radio networks; cooperative spectrum sensing; reporting period; time trade-off.