A Soft Sensing-Based Cognitive Access Scheme Exploiting Primary Feedback

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cognitive spectrum access scheme where secondary users leverage primary feedback to optimize access probabilities, improving throughput and delay performance while approaching ideal scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel soft sensing-based scheme that exploits primary feedback, formulated as a non-convex problem and efficiently solved to enhance secondary throughput and primary delay.

Findings

Improved secondary user throughput

Reduced primary user packet delay

Near-optimal performance compared to genie-aided schemes

Abstract

In this paper, we examine a cognitive spectrum access scheme in which secondary users exploit the primary feedback information. We consider an overlay secondary network employing a random access scheme in which secondary users access the channel by certain access probabilities that are function of the spectrum sensing metric. In setting our problem, we assume that secondary users can eavesdrop on the primary link's feedback. We study the cognitive radio network from a queuing theory point of view. Access probabilities are determined by solving a secondary throughput maximization problem subject to a constraint on the primary queues' stability. First, we formulate our problem which is found to be non-convex. Yet, we solve it efficiently by exploiting the structure of the secondary throughput equation. Our scheme yields improved results in, both, the secondary user throughput and the primary user packet delay. In addition, it comes very close to the optimal genie-aided scheme in which secondary users act upon the presumed perfect knowledge of the primary user's activity.