On the impact of the sensing rate of secondary users in Cognitive Radio Networks

The first phase in the operation of a Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) is the investigation of the availability of idle channels through channel sensing. In this paper we study the impact of the sensing rate of Secondary Users (SUs) in a CRN. We develop a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) to study the effect of the sensing rate σ on the performance measures of the CRN including the expected SU delay, the SU interruption probability, the probability a SU is discarded after entering the system and the SU blocking probability. The obtained results reveal that the sensing rate has a crucial impact on these measures.