Efficient secondary access with intelligent spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks

Abstract

SUMMARYIn cognitive radio networks, cooperative sensing can significantly improve the performance in detection of a primary user via secondary users (SUs) sharing their detection results. However, a large number of cooperative SUs may induce great sensing delay, which degrades the performance of secondary transmissions. In this paper, we jointly consider cooperative sensing and cognitive transmission in cognitive radio networks, aiming to achieve efficient secondary access with low sensing overhead under both the sensing time and reporting power limitations, where primary users are guaranteed to be sufficiently protected. We first propose an adaptive sensing scheme to lower the detection time while not degrading the detection probability. Then, based on the proposed adaptive sensing scheme, an efficient cognitive transmission protocol is well designed, which improves the throughput of secondary transmissions while ensuring the QoS of primary transmissions. We analyze the performance for the proposed secondary access framework in terms of misdetection probability, average detection time and normalized secondary throughput, respectively, and derive their closed‐form expressions over Rayleigh fading channels with considering the reporting errors accordingly. We also study the problems of optimizing the number of cooperative SUs to minimize the misdetection probability and average detection time, and maximize the normalized secondary throughput for proposed framework. Simulation results reveal that the proposed framework outperforms the traditional case significantly. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.