Optimal Channel Sensing Strategy for Cognitive Radio Networks with Heavy-Tailed Idle Times

In Cognitive Radio Network (CRN), the secondary user (SU) opportunistically access the wireless channels whenever they are free from the licensed / Primary User (PU). Even after occupying the channel, the SU has to sense the channel intermittently to detect reappearance of PU, so that it can stop its transmission and avoid interference to PU. Frequent channel sensing results in the degradation of SU's throughput whereas sparse sensing increases the interference experienced by the PU. Thus, optimal sensing interval policy plays a vital role in CRN. In the literature, optimal channel sensing strategy has been analysed for the case when the ON-OFF time distributions of PU are exponential. However, the analysis of recent spectrum measurement traces reveals that PU exhibits heavy-tailed idle times which can be approximated well with Hyper-exponential distribution (HED). In our work, we deduce the structure of optimal sensing interval policy for channels with HED OFF times through Markov Decision Process (MDP). We then use dynamic programming framework to derive sub-optimal sensing interval policies. A new Multishot sensing interval policy is proposed and it is compared with existing policies for its performance in terms of number of channel sensing and interference to PU.Comment: 20 pages (single column), 7 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking for possible publicatio

A Centralized Multi-stage Non-parametric Learning Algorithm for Opportunistic Spectrum Access

Owing to the ever-increasing demand in wireless spectrum, Cognitive Radio (CR) was introduced as a technique to attain high spectral efficiency. As the number of secondary users (SUs) connecting to the cognitive radio network is on the rise, there is an imminent need for centralized algorithms that provide high throughput and energy efficiency of the SUs while ensuring minimum interference to the licensed users. In this work, we propose a multi-stage algorithm that - 1) effectively assigns the available channel to the SUs, 2) employs a non-parametric learning framework to estimate the primary traffic distribution to minimize sensing, and 3) proposes an adaptive framework to ensure that the collision to the primary user is below the specified threshold. We provide comprehensive empirical validation of the method with other approaches.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl