Separation principle for 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. We formulate the joint design of OSA as a constrained partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). A separation principle for the joint design of OSA is established under certain conditions on the false alarm probability of the spectrum sensor. This result extends the separation principle for OSA in slotted primary systems to unslotted primary systems.