Optimal Detection of Spatial Opportunity in Wireless Networks

The scarceness of the radio spectrum leads to opportunistic spectrum access or cognitive radio. In this letter, we analyze the spectrum sensing threshold to improve reliability of opportunity detection in the spatial domain. We minimize the weighted sum of exposed- and hidden node probabilities, and derive the optimal spectrum sensing threshold as a closed form formula. We take the estimation error into account, which is parameterized into the sensing threshold. Our analytic results will provide a fundamental framework for opportunistic spectrum access networks or wireless LANs.