What is Primary Users

Spectrum sensing errors in cognitive radio may occur due to constant changes in the environment like changes in background noise, movements of the users, temperature variations, etc. It leads to under usage of available spectrum bands or may cause interference to the primary user transmission. So, sensing parameters like detection threshold are required to adapt dynamically to the changing environment to minimise sensing errors. Correct sensing requires processing huge data sets just like Big Data. This chapter investigates sensing in light of Big Data and presents the study of the nature inspired algorithms in sensing error minimisation by dynamic adaptation of the threshold value. Death penalty constrained handing techniques are integrated to the genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimisation, the firefly algorithm and the bat algorithm. Based on them, four algorithms are developed for minimizing sensing errors. The reported algorithms are found to be faster and more accurate when compared with previously proposed threshold adaptation algorithms based on a gradient descend.