Outage Probability Analysis for Cognitive Radios with Reception Diversity

Outage probability for cognitive radios is investigated in this paper. The scenario under consideration requires the cognitive radio to sense whether the primary user (PU) link is free (or exists a spectrum hole) before making an active transmission using that link. The use of multiple antennas at the cognitive receiver provides array gains at the sensing stage. We derive a closed-form outage probability for cognitive transmissions by classifying them into several cases.