The Impact of Inaccurate Sensing Information in Cognitive Wireless Personal Area Networks

Successful operation of a wireless personal area network utilizing cognitive radio technology requires accurate and timely sensing of the status of channels the network operates on. The performance of the sensing process in which the working set of N channels is sensed by randomly choosing X < N channels, is analyzed via two performance measures: the difference in the true number of free channels and the number viewed by the cognitive network, and the delay in detecting the activity changes on the channels from the working set. Our probabilistic analysis points to the range of values in which such, incomplete sensing is capable of maintaining an accurate view of the status of the working channel set.