Copyright and moral rights to this thesis/research project are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. Any use of the thesis/research project for private study or research must be properly acknowledged with reference to the work's full bibliographic details.This thesis/research project may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from it, or its content changed in any way, without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s).If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address:The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated.
Copyright:Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University's research available electronically.Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. No part of the work may be sold or exploited commercially in any format or medium without the prior written permission of the copyright holder(s). A copy may be downloaded for personal, noncommercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. Any use of the work for private study or research must be properly acknowledged with reference to the work's full bibliographic details.This work may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from it, or its content changed in any way, without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s).If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address: eprints@mdx.ac.ukThe item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. This paper is concerned with cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) mechanisms in three-hop cognitive wireless relay networks (CWRNs). The data transmission from a source to a destination is realised with the aid of two layers of cognitive radio (CR) users which are in the transmission coverage of two primary users. In this paper, we first propose a new CSS scheme for a layer of CR users to improve the spectrum sensing performance by exploiting both local decisions at the CR users and global decisions at the fusion centre. Particularly, we derive the probabilities of missed detection and false alarm for a practical scenario where all sensing, reporting, and backward channels suffer from Rayleigh fading.The derived expressions not only show that our proposed CSS achieves a better sensing performance than the conventional scheme but also characterise the effects of the fading channels on the sensing reliability. Furthermore, we propose a CSS scheme for two CR layers in a three-hop CWRN using binary XOR...