A Formula for Successful Transmission Probability in Opportunistic Networks Under Memory-Time Correlated Channel Availability

Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technology in wireless Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) provides opportunistic access for unlicensed users, also known as Secondary Users (SUs), which can offer huge bandwidth to enable future wireless communication. Mainly, this technology aims to improve the end-to-end throughput by allowing SUs to exploit the licensed channels only when their licensed users, also known as Primary Users (PUs), are not using them. Most existing communication protocols designed for CRNs are based on the assumption that the channel availability time is considered based on a memory-less distribution for PUs arrivals. Unfortunately, this assumption is impractical because the PU channels’ activity and availability are memory-time correlated. Worse yet, designing communication protocols for CRNs under this assumption can result in overestimating the Probability of Success (PoS) for SU packet transmissions, resulting in severe degradation in network performance in realistic scenarios. This paper derives a closed-form formula under memory-time correlation for channel availability that quantifies the PoS for SUs’ packet transmission in CRNs. This will empower the network designers to get practical expectations about network efficiency rather than the overestimated PoS. Therefore, this work is also useful for emerging wireless networks with multi-hop routing, such as 5G, 6G, vehicular networks, etc., which incorporate DSA techniques. Our numerical and simulation results demonstrate that the PoS is overestimated in most of the literature due to adopting memoryless-based distribution in modeling channels’ availability; such overestimation can impact communication protocol decisions, resulting in severe network performance degradation.