Sensing-throughput tradeoff in spectrum handoff-based cognitive radio

Abstract

In cognitive radio (CR), there is a tradeoff between spectrum sensing time and throughput of secondary user (SU). In order to improve the SU’s throughput, a sensing-throughput tradeoff in spectrum-handoff based CR is proposed, which allows the SU to search and transfer to a new idle channel to continue communication, when the PU is present. An optimization problem is proposed to maximize the SU’s throughput in the proposed scheme through jointly optimizing the sensing time, the searching time and the number of available channels subject to the detection probability to the PU. The simulation results show that there exist the optimal solutions to the proposed scheme and the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme notably.