Interference-constrained adaptive simultaneous spectrum sensing and data transmission scheme for unslotted cognitive radio network

Cognitive radio (CR) is widely recognized as a novel approach to improve the spectrum efficiency. However, there exists one problem needed to be resolved urgently, that is the two conflicting goals in CR network: one is to minimize the interference to primary (licensed) system; the other is to maximize the throughput of secondary (unlicensed) system. Meanwhile, the secondary user (SU) has to monitor the spectrum continuously to avoid the interference to primary user (PU), thus the throughput of the secondary system is affected by how often and how long the spectrum sensing is performed. Aiming to balance the two conflicting goals, this article proposes a novel Interference-Constrained Adaptive Simultaneous spectrum Sensing and data Transmission (ICASST) scheme for unslotted CR network, where SUs are not synchronized with PUs. In the ICASST scheme, taking advantage of the statistic information of PU’s activities, the data transmission time is adaptively adjusted to avoid the interference peculiar to unslotted CR network; the operation of spectrum sensing is moved to SU receiver from SU transmitter to increase the data transmission time and hence improve the throughput of SU. Simulation results validate the efficiency of ICASST scheme, which significantly increases the throughput of secondary system and decreases the interference to PU simultaneously.