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Summary An ever‐escalating demand for wireless applications has caused great concern for the proper exploitation of the accessible radio spectrum. Cognitive radio materializes as an auspicious remedy to the present‐day crisis of spectral congestion, by detecting the licensed primary user (PU). This is accomplished with the assistance of the spectrum sensing technique, which provides an indication of the presence of PU over the spectrum. Energy detection is one of the prevailing spectrum sensing techniques due to its low implementation complexity. In the present work, the performance of an energy detector (ED) over Inverse‐Gamma (I‐Gamma) fading distribution is examined. Initially, a closed‐form expression of the probability density function for I‐Gamma distribution with maximal ratio combining diversity reception is derived. Following it, an investigation of an ED‐based cognitive radio device is carried out in the form of the average probability of detection (PD) and average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). In addition, we also present a performance analysis of an ED with selection combining diversity. Optimization of the detection threshold is also executed alongside the low signal‐to‐noise ratio analysis. In the end, the resulting expression of the PD is exploited to examine the functioning of cooperative spectrum sensing within the erroneous environment. The validation of derived mathematical forms has been confirmed by comparing it with the Monte‐Carlo simulation and exact numerical results.

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