Spectrum sensing plays an essential role in a cognitive radio network, which enables opportunistic access to an underutilized licensed spectrum. In conventional cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS), all cognitive users (CUs) in the network spend the same amount of time on spectrum sensing and waste time in remaining silent when other CUs report their sensing results to the fusion center. This problem is solved by the superposition cooperative spectrum sensing (SPCSS) scheme, where the sensing

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... of a CU is extended to the reporting time of the other CUs. Subsequently, SPCSS assigns the CUs different sensing times and thus affects both the sensing performance and the throughput of the system. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to determine the optimal sensing time of each CU for SPCSS that maximizes the achieved system throughput. The simulation results prove that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the throughput of the cognitive radio network compared with the conventional CSS.