Cognitive radio has emerged as a promising technology for maximizing the utilization efficiency of the limited spectrum resources while accommodating the increasing amount of services and applications in wireless networks. One of the most important and critical components of the cognitive radio is spectrum sensing and accordingly, detection of primary users. Considering the hardware constraints existing in cognitive devices, based on the coarse estimation of channel occupancy, partial cooperative spectrum sensing with adaptive spectrum schedule scheme is proposed to increase the possibility to discover more spectrum opportunities promptly. Simulation results show the gain of sensing performance and the energy-saving feature of partial spectrum sensing. Special security scheme is designed to protect the reliability of sensing result from the false message attack. For the scenarios tested, the proposed scheme is shown to increase opportunities by up to 15 percent.
