Full Duplex Joint Sensing for Opportunistic Access in Spectrum-Heterogeneous Cognitive Radio Networks

1  Abstract—In cognitive radio networks (CRN), secondary users (SUs) can share spectrum with licensed primary users (PUs). Because an SU receiver (SU-Rx) does not always share the same view of spectrum availability as the corresponding SU transmitter (SU-Tx), spectrum sensing conducted only by an SU transmitter tends to be overly sensitive to guarantee safe spectrum access at the price of SU inefficiency. In this letter, we propose a joint spectrum sensing mechanism, named Full-Duplex Joint Sensing (FJDS), to relax sensitivity of SU detection and improve SU throughput. FDJS employs instantaneous feedback enabled by in-band full duplex communication to facilitate the sharing of spectral information from SU-Rx to SU-Tx. The joint detection problem in FDJS is modeled as non-linear optimization and solved by a binary searching algorithm. Simulation results show that FDJS could improve SU throughput as well as meeting PU interruption constraints in a wide range of parameter settings.