Opportunistic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio Networks Under Imperfect Spectrum Sensing

In this paper, we investigate the effect of imperfect sensing on the performance of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) in cognitive radio (CR) networks. We consider a system modeled as a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC), and then evaluate its performance in terms of the probabilities of users being blocked or dropped. Our results demonstrate that the performance of the underlying system significantly degrades when imperfect sensing is considered; thus, there is a pressing need for a reliable spectrum sensing scheme to improve the overall quality of service in practical scenarios. A simulation study is presented to corroborate the analytical results and to demonstrate the performance of OSA under imperfect sensing conditions.