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
