Performance Evaluation of Cognitive Radio CDMA Networks with Spectrum Sensing

In this paper, the performance of Cognitive Radio (CR) CDMA networks is analyzed. More precisely, we develop a simulation testbed for analyzing the performance of a CR user with and without spectrum sensing in a three cell scenario. Three different schemes for spectrum sensing are studied. CR users belong to a Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) which is coexisting with a Primary Radio Network (PRN). Both CRN and PRN are CDMA-based. Soft Handoff (HO) and power control are considered for both CRN and PRN. We evaluate the performance of the proposed systems in terms of outage probability, blocking probability, and average data rate of secondary users (SUs). For comparison purposes, together with the three considered schemes with spectrum sensing we also analyze a scheme without spectrum sensing.