A hybrid cognitive transceiver architecture: Sensing-throughput tradeoff

Spectrum Sensing (SS) and underlay have been considered as two important techniques for enabling the spectral coexistence of the licensed and unlicensed wireless communication systems. The SS only approach ignores the interference tolerance capability of the Primary Users (PUs) while assuming the bursty PU traffic whereas the possibility of having secondary transmission with full power is neglected in an underlay based approach. To address this, it's crucial to investigate suitable hybrid spectrum awareness and transmission strategies which can overcome the aforementioned drawbacks and achieve higher secondary throughput while protecting the PUs. In this context, we propose a hybrid cognitive transceiver which combines the SS approach with the power control based underlay approach. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of the proposed hybrid approach considering both periodic sensing and simultaneous sensing/transmission schemes. Moreover, sensing-throughput tradeoff for the proposed hybrid approach is investigated and the performance is compared with the conventional SS only approaches in terms of the achievable throughput. It is shown that the proposed scheme can achieve a significant improvement in the secondary throughput over the conventional approaches while respecting the interference constraints of the PUs.