AbstractThis work proposes a fully distributed improved weighted average consensus (IWAC) technique applied to a cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) problem in cognitive radio systems. This method allows the secondary users to cooperate based on only local information exchange without a fusion centre. We have compared 4 rules of average consensus (AC) algorithms. The first rule is the simple AC without weights. The AC rule presents performance comparable to the traditional CSS techniques such as the equal gain combining rule, which is a soft combining centralised method. Another technique is the weighted AC (WAC) rule, using the weights based on the SUs' channel condition. This technique results in a performance similar to that of the maximum ratio combining with soft combining (centralised CSS). Two new AC rules are analysed, namely, WAC accuracy exchange (WAC‐AE) and IWAC; the former relates the weights to the channel conditions of the SUs' neighbours, whereas the latter combines the conditions of WAC and WAC‐AE in the same rule. All methods are compared with each other and with the hard combining centralised CSS. The WAC‐AE results in a similar performance of the WAC technique but with fast convergence, whereas the IWAC can deliver suitable performance with small complexity increment. Moreover, the IWAC method results in a similar convergence rate than the WAC‐AE method but slightly higher than the AC and WAC methods. Hence, the computational complexity of IWAC, WAC‐AE, and WAC is proven to be very similar. The analyses are based on numerical Monte Carlo simulations, whereas the algorithm's convergence is evaluated for both fixed and dynamic mobile communication scenarios and under additive white Gaussian noise and Rayleigh channels.