Intelligent Improvement in Throughput of Cognitive Radio

Abstract

Under the energy detection scheme based cognitive radio (CR) system, the process of spectrum sensing is of high importance. The sensing performance of CR primarily depends on two important parameters namely, the sensing time τ and the reference threshold λ. In order to achieve a goal where the CR system obtains a high value of throughput and simultaneously ensures a sufficient level of protection to the licensed users, the values of these parameters can neither be too high nor too low, so proper settings of their values is of prime concern. However, under these constraints on choosing a particular value of τ and λ, it is challenging for CR to fulfill this goal. In this paper we propose a CR system which operates under the scheme of double threshold to ensure a sufficient protection required by the licensed users and also makes an efficient utilization of the confusion region to improve its achievable throughput. It is observed that, under the proposed approach, the CR system achieves better throughput than the CR system based on the single threshold and also to the conventional double threshold based CR system where confusion region is used based on the results of sensing performed in the next sensing rounds. We further study the problem of optimizing the sensing duration to maximize the throughput of the proposed CR system. We formulate the sensing-throughput tradeoff problem mathematically and prove that, the formulated problem indeed has an optimal sensing duration where throughput of the CR system is maximized.