Sensing of wireless microphones in IEEE 802.22: A system level performance evaluation

We present results on the system level performance of the IEEE 802.22 standard with sensing functionality, using a highly detailed implementation of the IEEE 802.22 protocol stack in the NS-2 simulator. Our attention is focused on the effect of spatio-temporal wireless microphone (WM) activity on the performance of the IEEE 802.22 network with spectrum sensing considered. In general we find that the frequency of WM appearance and activity duration should be quite high in all channels not used by TV broadcasters to reduce IEEE 802.22 throughput, for example about 50% WM occupancy in each of total of four channels. Impact on WM performance is found to be low in general using the two-stage spectrum sensing strategy with frequent sensing stages.