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Although employing cooperation in spectrum sensing for cognitive radio (CR) systems improves the detection accuracy by mitigating the shadowing and multi-path fading faced by cognitive users, it increases the energy consumption especially because spectrum sensing is a periodic process. Therefore, for battery-powered terminals, energy efficiency represents a favorable metric in system design. One of the ways to improve the energy efficiency in CR is to optimize the fusion rule (FR) by which the individual results are processed. In this paper, we optimize the well known FR K-out-of-N for maximizing energy efficiency and detection accuracy. Mathematical expressions for the optimal N and K for both objectives are obtained. Simulation and analytical results show that significant improvement in energy efficiency can be achieved through FR optimization while satisfying a predefined threshold on the missed …