Sensing-throughput Trade off for Interference-aware Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract

Nowadays cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have been proposed as a promising method to solve the problem of radio spectrum shortage and spectrum sensing has been known as a key step to enable the CRNs and utilize the precious spectrum resource. In order to protect primary users from being interfered, most of the related works have focused on the restriction of the probability of missed detection only, however in practice, even under the missed detection cases, secondary users located far away from the primary users can also be interference-free to primary users. Motivated by this fact, in this paper we first introduce an interference-aware spectrum sensing model and investigate the issue of sensing-throughput tradeoff in interference-aware cognitive radio networks for a single detector. Then we extend the interference-aware spectrum sensing model to the problem of cooperative spectrum sensing among a group of secondary users. Specifically, in this paper we take the throughput as the objective of the cognitive radio network, and search for the maximum achievable throughput by jointly optimizing the sensing time and the detection threshold. Compared with the existing algorithms, the accompanying analytical and numerical analysis in this paper show that the proposed algorithm makes better utilization of the spectrum resource, for which a higher throughput performance can be achieved in cognitive radio networks.