Throughput Analysis of Overlay CSMA/CA for Secondary Networks

Overlay access has recently appeared as a promising solution that improves licensed spectrum utilization, by allowing secondary networks to exploit portions of spectrum when they are not used by licensed networks. Moreover wireless local area networks, with the IEEE 802.11 standard as their major representative, have widely spread as a very successful broadband wireless access technology. In this work we present an analytical model for the saturation throughput calculation of the distributed coordination function, the core of IEEE 802.11, in the overlay operation mode for cognitive radios forming secondary networks.