Aggregate interference and system performance in finite area cognitive radio networks

Interference management is a major issue in underlay cognitive radio networks. In this paper, we focus on characterizing the statistics of the aggregate interference experienced by a primary user and evaluate its performance through important metrics such as outage probability, bit error rate and amount of fading. In previous works, the infinite interferers area assumption prevailed since it mainly simplifies the analysis. In contrast, we investigate the more realistic finite area, and further consider various practical spatial configurations. Two of the possible applications the proposed finite reconfigurable model can advocate are the IEEE 802.22 (WRAN) digital TV scenario and the aggregate interference considering different path loss exponents. We first derive the exact moment generating function (MGF) of the interference, then quantify the mean, the variance, and the skewness. Subsequently, the primary system performances are evaluated leading to novel expressions based on the interference MGF.