Cross‐layer aware joint design of sensing and frame durations in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

The tradeoff between increasing secondary users’ (SUs’) throughput and decreasing interferences to primary user (PU) is an important problem in cognitive radio networks. Joint design of sensing duration and frame duration has a crucial impact on both these two conflicting attributes but has not been studied yet. In this study, using a cross-layer approach, the authors investigate joint design of sensing duration and frame duration for the tradeoff. Specially, they consider that PU's traffic randomly changes within a secondary frame and multiple SUs contend to use the licensed channel based on widely used large/small-scale-backoff-based MAC protocols. By modelling more realistic PU's traffic, imperfect spectrum sensing in PHY and multiple SUs’ access contention in MAC, the authors reformulate the sensing-throughput tradeoff problem to maximise SUs’ throughput while restricting interference probability to PU under a tolerable level. Moreover, the optimal solution is analysed and a bi-dimensional search algorithm is presented. Simulation results show that the authors’ proposal achieves better throughput performance than conventional approaches. They also show how the optimal solution varies with received PU's signal-to-noise ratio and PU's traffic distribution.