  Cognitive radio (CR) is to detect the presence of primary users (PUs)
reliably in order to reduce the interference to licensed communications.
Genetic algorithms (GAs) are well suited for CR optimization problems to
increase efficiency of bandwidth utilization by manipulating its unused
portions of the apparent spectrum. In this paper, a binary genetic algorithm
(BGA)-based soft fusion (SF) scheme for cooperative spectrum sensing in
cognitive radio network is proposed to improve detection performance and
bandwidth utilization. The BGA-based optimization method is implemented at the
fusion centre of a linear SF scheme to optimize the weighting coefficients
vector to maximize global probability of detection performance. Simulation
results and analyses confirm that the proposed scheme meets real time
requirements of cognitive radio spectrum sensing and it outperforms
conventional natural deflection coefficient- (NDC-), modified deflection
coefficient- (MDC-), maximal ratio combining- (MRC-) and equal gain combining-
(EGC-) based SDF schemes as well as the OR-rule based hard decision fusion
(HDF). The propose BGA scheme also converges fast and achieves the optimum
performance, which means that BGA-based method is efficient and quite stable
also.
