1,248 research outputs found
Joint Design and Separation Principle for Opportunistic Spectrum Access in the Presence of Sensing Errors
We address the design of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) strategies that
allow secondary users to independently search for and exploit instantaneous
spectrum availability. Integrated in the joint design are three basic
components: a spectrum sensor that identifies spectrum opportunities, a sensing
strategy that determines which channels in the spectrum to sense, and an access
strategy that decides whether to access based on imperfect sensing outcomes.
We formulate the joint PHY-MAC design of OSA as a constrained partially
observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Constrained POMDPs generally
require randomized policies to achieve optimality, which are often intractable.
By exploiting the rich structure of the underlying problem, we establish a
separation principle for the joint design of OSA. This separation principle
reveals the optimality of myopic policies for the design of the spectrum sensor
and the access strategy, leading to closed-form optimal solutions. Furthermore,
decoupling the design of the sensing strategy from that of the spectrum sensor
and the access strategy, the separation principle reduces the constrained POMDP
to an unconstrained one, which admits deterministic optimal policies. Numerical
examples are provided to study the design tradeoffs, the interaction between
the spectrum sensor and the sensing and access strategies, and the robustness
of the ensuing design to model mismatch.Comment: 43 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information
Theory in Feb. 200
Cognitive MAC Protocols Using Memory for Distributed Spectrum Sharing Under Limited Spectrum Sensing
The main challenges of cognitive radio include spectrum sensing at the
physical (PHY) layer to detect the activity of primary users and spectrum
sharing at the medium access control (MAC) layer to coordinate access among
coexisting secondary users. In this paper, we consider a cognitive radio
network in which a primary user shares a channel with secondary users that
cannot distinguish the signals of the primary user from those of a secondary
user. We propose a class of distributed cognitive MAC protocols to achieve
efficient spectrum sharing among the secondary users while protecting the
primary user from potential interference by the secondary users. By using a MAC
protocol with one-slot memory, we can obtain high channel utilization by the
secondary users while limiting interference to the primary user at a low level.
The results of this paper suggest the possibility of utilizing MAC design in
cognitive radio networks to overcome limitations in spectrum sensing at the PHY
layer as well as to achieve spectrum sharing at the MAC layer.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figure
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