An efficient quiet period management scheme for cognitive radio systems

In cognitive radio (CR) systems, the channel sensing scheme for detecting the presence of primary user directly affects the quality-of-service of CR users and primary user. In this letter, we propose a sensing scheme that consists of a series of consecutive energy detections followed by feature detection, where the energy detection time is much shorter than the feature detection time. With the proposed scheme, multiple energy detections decrease the feature detection due to false alarm and the overall channel sensing time. The performance evaluation using Markov analysis shows that the proposed scheme can heighten the maximum channel utilization of CR users, while maintaining the detection delay of primary user under a predefined value.