Opportunistic spectrum access in unslotted primary systems

We consider the design of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) strategies that allow secondary users to search for and exploit spectrum opportunities in unslotted primary systems. The traffic of the primary system in each channel is modeled by a continuous time Markov process. We formulate the joint design of OSA as a constrained discrete-time partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). A separation principle for the joint design of OSA is established under certain conditions on the probability of false alarm of the spectrum sensor. This result extends the separation principle for OSA in slotted primary systems to unslotted primary systems. Furthermore, we show that the myopic sensing policy has a simple and robust structure under certain conditions on the probability of false alarm.