Performance Analysis of Adaptive Modulation for Cognitive Radios with Opportunistic Access

The performance of adaptive modulation for cognitive radio with opportunistic access is analyzed by considering the effects of spectrum sensing and primary user traffic for Nakagami-m fading channels. Both the adaptive continuous rate scheme and the adaptive discrete rate scheme are considered. Numerical results show that spectrum sensing and primary user traffic cause considerable degradation to the bit error rate performance of adaptive modulation in a cognitive radio system with opportunistic access to the licensed channel. They also show that primary user traffic does not affect the link spectral efficiency performance of adaptive modulation, while the spectrum sensing degrades the link spectral efficiency performance.