An opportunistic channel access scheme for interweave cognitive radio systems

We propose a novel opportunistic access scheme for cognitive radios in an interweave cognitive system, that considers the channel gain as well as the predicted idle channel probability (primary user occupancy: Busy/idle). In contrast to previous work where a cognitive user vacates a channel only when that channel becomes busy, the proposed scheme requires the cognitive user to switch to the channel with the next highest idle probability if the current channel's gain is below a certain threshold. We derive the threshold values that maximize the long term throughput for various primary user transition probabilities and cognitive user's relative movement.