Making the best of limited resources: Optimized differential sensing in cognitive PANs

Cognitive radio technology necessitates accurate and timely sensing of primary users’ activity on the chosen set of channels. The simplest selection procedure is a simple random choice of channels to be sensed, but the impact of sensing errors with respect to primary user activity or inactivity differs considerably. In order to improve sensing accuracy and increase the likelihood of finding channels which are free from primary user activity, the selection procedure is modified by assigning different sensing probabilities to active and inactive channels. The paper presents a probabilistic analysis of this policy and investigates the range of values in which the modulation of sensing probability is capable of maintaining an accurate view of the status of the working channel set. We also present a modification of the probability modulation algorithm that adapts the weighting factor to changes in perceived duty cycle of primary users’ activity, and show that it achieves minimum sensing error in a wide range of the values of that duty cycle.