Sensing-throughput tradeoff for cognitive radios

This paper focuses on sensing-throughput tradeoffs for overlay cognitive radio networks. The goal is to maximize the opportunistic secondary user throughput, by limiting the disturbance to primary user activity. Specifically, by assuming that a Poisson birth-death process characterizes the primary user traffic, the sensing-time bounds are imposed by granting enough accuracy to the detection of primary user activity, while the optimum duration for secondary user transmissions is obtained by maximizing analytical expressions for the secondary user average capacity. This paper also clarifies some subtle differences with the existing literature on the subject, which may lead to misleading results. Computer simulations corroborate the proposed theoretical findings.