Throughput analysis for cognitive radio networks with multiple primary users and imperfect spectrum sensing

In cognitive radio networks, the licensed frequency bands of the primary users (PUs) are available to the secondary user (SU) provided that they do not cause significant interference to the PUs. In this study, the authors analysed the normalised throughput of the SU with multiple PUs coexisting under any frequency division multiple access communication protocol. The authors consider a cognitive radio transmission where the frame structure consists of sensing and data transmission slots. In order to achieve the maximum normalised throughput of the SU and control the interference level to the legal PUs, the optimal frame length of the SU is found via simulation. In this context, a new analytical formula has been expressed for the achievable normalised throughput of SU with multiple PUs under prefect and imperfect spectrum sensing scenarios. Moreover, the impact of imperfect sensing, variable frame length of SU and the variable PU traffic loads, on the normalised throughput has been critically investigated. It has been shown that the analytical and simulation results are in perfect agreement. The authors analytical results are much useful to determine how to select the frame duration length subject to the parameters of cognitive radio network, such as network traffic load, achievable sensing accuracy and number of coexisting PUs

Interference Mitigation for Cognitive Radio MIMO Systems Based on Practical Precoding

In this paper, we propose two subspace-projection-based precoding schemes, namely, full-projection (FP)- and partial-projection (PP)-based precoding, for a cognitive radio multiple-input multiple-output (CR-MIMO) network to mitigate its interference to a primary time-division-duplexing (TDD) system. The proposed precoding schemes are capable of estimating interference channels between CR and primary networks, and incorporating the interference from the primary to the CR system into CR precoding via a novel sensing approach. Then, the CR performance and resulting interference of the proposed precoding schemes are analyzed and evaluated. By fully projecting the CR transmission onto a null space of the interference channels, the FP-based precoding scheme can effectively avoid interfering the primary system with boosted CR throughput. While, the PP-based scheme is able to further improve the CR throughput by partially projecting its transmission onto the null space.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the IEEE Trans. Wireless Communications in April 201

On the Performance of Spectrum Sensing Algorithms using Multiple Antennas

In recent years, some spectrum sensing algorithms using multiple antennas, such as the eigenvalue based detection (EBD), have attracted a lot of attention. In this paper, we are interested in deriving the asymptotic distributions of the test statistics of the EBD algorithms. Two EBD algorithms using sample covariance matrices are considered: maximum eigenvalue detection (MED) and condition number detection (CND). The earlier studies usually assume that the number of antennas (K) and the number of samples (N) are both large, thus random matrix theory (RMT) can be used to derive the asymptotic distributions of the maximum and minimum eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrices. While assuming the number of antennas being large simplifies the derivations, in practice, the number of antennas equipped at a single secondary user is usually small, say 2 or 3, and once designed, this antenna number is fixed. Thus in this paper, our objective is to derive the asymptotic distributions of the eigenvalues and condition numbers of the sample covariance matrices for any fixed K but large N, from which the probability of detection and probability of false alarm can be obtained. The proposed methodology can also be used to analyze the performance of other EBD algorithms. Finally, computer simulations are presented to validate the accuracy of the derived results.Comment: IEEE GlobeCom 201

Sensing-Throughput Tradeoff for Interweave Cognitive Radio System: A Deployment-Centric Viewpoint

Secondary access to the licensed spectrum is viable only if interference is avoided at the primary system. In this regard, different paradigms have been conceptualized in the existing literature. Of these, Interweave Systems (ISs) that employ spectrum sensing have been widely investigated. Baseline models investigated in the literature characterize the performance of IS in terms of a sensing-throughput tradeoff, however, this characterization assumes the knowledge of the involved channels at the secondary transmitter, which is unavailable in practice. Motivated by this fact, we establish a novel approach that incorporates channel estimation in the system model, and consequently investigate the impact of imperfect channel estimation on the performance of the IS. More particularly, the variation induced in the detection probability affects the detector's performance at the secondary transmitter, which may result in severe interference at the primary users. In this view, we propose to employ average and outage constraints on the detection probability, in order to capture the performance of the IS. Our analysis reveals that with an appropriate choice of the estimation time determined by the proposed model, the degradation in performance of the IS can be effectively controlled, and subsequently the achievable secondary throughput can be significantly enhanced.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, Accepted to be published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Spectral and Energy Efficiency in Cognitive Radio Systems with Unslotted Primary Users and Sensing Uncertainty

This paper studies energy efficiency (EE) and average throughput maximization for cognitive radio systems in the presence of unslotted primary users. It is assumed that primary user activity follows an ON-OFF alternating renewal process. Secondary users first sense the channel possibly with errors in the form of miss detections and false alarms, and then start the data transmission only if no primary user activity is detected. The secondary user transmission is subject to constraints on collision duration ratio, which is defined as the ratio of average collision duration to transmission duration. In this setting, the optimal power control policy which maximizes the EE of the secondary users or maximizes the average throughput while satisfying a minimum required EE under average/peak transmit power and average interference power constraints are derived. Subsequently, low-complexity algorithms for jointly determining the optimal power level and frame duration are proposed. The impact of probabilities of detection and false alarm, transmit and interference power constraints on the EE, average throughput of the secondary users, optimal transmission power, and the collisions with primary user transmissions are evaluated. In addition, some important properties of the collision duration ratio are investigated. The tradeoff between the EE and average throughput under imperfect sensing decisions and different primary user traffic are further analyzed.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Performance analyses and design for cognitive radios

Cognitive radio has been proposed as a promising solution to the conflict between the spectrum scarcity and spectrum under-utilization. As the demand increases for wireless communication services, cognitive radio technology attracts huge attention from both commercial industries and academic researches. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an analytical evaluation of the cognitive radio system performance while taking into consideration of some realistic conditions. Several problems are investigated in this thesis. First, by adopting a dynamic primary user traffic model with one primary user occupancy status change and exponentially distributed channel holding times, its effect on the cognitive radio system performance is evaluated. In the evaluation, the sensing-throughput tradeoff of the cognitive radio is used as the examination criteria, while energy detection is applied during the spectrum sensing. The thesis then takes the investigation further by establishing a primary user multiple changes traffic model which considers multiple primary user occupancy status changes and any reasonable channel holding time distributions. The effect of the primary user multiple changes traffic on the spectrum sensing performance is investigated while the channel holding times are assumed to be exponential, Gamma, Erlang and log-normal distributed. The analytical evaluation of cognitive radio is also carried out from the secondary user transmission perspective, where the performance of the adaptive modulation in cognitive radio system is investigated. The effect of the cognitive radio distinctive features on the performance of both the adaptive continuous rate scheme and the adaptive discrete rate scheme of the adaptive modulation are examined. The BER performance and the link spectral efficiency performance are derived for both schemes. A novel frame structure where the spectrum sensing is performed by using the recovered received secondary frames is also evaluated in this thesis. A realistic scenario which considers the secondary user signal decoding errors is examined for the novel structure, while an ideal upper bound performance is given when the decoding process is assumed perfect. By extending the system to include multiple consecutive secondary frames, the performance of the novel structure is compared to the performance of the traditional frame structure proposed by the IEEE 802.22 WRAN standard. The effect of the primary user multiple changes traffic is also examined for the novel structure. Several major findings are made from the analytical evaluations presented in this thesis. Through numerical examinations, it was shown that, first, the dynamic primary user traffic degrades the performance of cognitive radio systems. Second, the degree of the performance degradation of the cognitive radio systems is related to the number of primary user status changes and the primary user traffic intensity. Different primary user channel holding times distributions also lead to different sensitivities of the system performance to the primary user traffic. Third, cognitive radio distinctive features degrades the performance of the adaptive modulation. When the novel structure is applied for cognitive radio, a higher secondary achievable throughput can be obtained with a limited saturation threshold