Effective Capacity Analysis for Cognitive Networks under Satisfaction

Spectrum sensing and dynamic spectrum access (DSA) techniques in cognitive radio networks (CRN) have been extensively investigated since last decade. Recently, satisfaction of quality-of-service (QoS) demands for secondary users (SU) has attracted great attention. The SU can not only discover the transmission opportunities, but also cognitively adapts the dynamic spectrum access strategies to its own QoS requirement and the environment variations. In this paper, we study how the delay QoS requirement affects the strategy on network performance. We first treat the delay-QoS in interference constrained cognitive radio network by applying the effective capacity concept, focusing on the two dominant DSA schemes: underlay and overlay. We obtain the effective capacity of the secondary network and determine the power allocation policies that maximize the throughput of the cognitive user. The underlay and overlay approaches may have their respective advantages under diverse propagation environment and system parameters. If the cognitive network can dynamically choose the DSA strategy under different environment, its performance could be further improved. We propose a selection criterion to determine whether to use underlay or overlay scheme under the given QoS constraint and the PUs’ spectrum-occupancy probability. Thus, the throughput of the CRN could be increased. Performance analysis and numerical evaluations are provided to demonstrate the effective capacity of CRN based on the underlay and the overlay schemes, taking into consideration the impact of delay QoS requirement and other related parameters