Abstract—Cognitive radio MAC protocols have been proposed to efficiently utilize radio resources under the assumption that radio spectrum can be perfectly sensed. However, due to dynamic and agile radio characteristics, secondary users may imperfectly detect whether the radio resources are occupied or not. In this paper, we study how the imperfect sensing environment affects cognitive radio systems. The sensing errors, i.e., misdetection and false alarm, result in interference to the primary users and decrease the transmission opportunities of secondary users. We formulate the number of sensed idle channels for different sensing mechanisms and the throughput of the multi-channel cognitive MAC protocol with the misdetection and the false alarm probabilities. Simulations are also conducted to verify the analysis. According to the results, the imperfect sensing should be considered as a critical factor when the cognitive MAC protocols are designed due to the influence on primary users’ and secondary users’ transmissions.

Index Terms—Cognitive radio, MAC protocols, ad-hoc networks, multi-channel, imperfect sensing.

Mingyu Lee and Tae-Jin Lee are with the College of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea.
Seyoun Lim is with the DMC R&D Center, Samsung Electronics, Suwon, Korea.

Cite:Mingyu Lee, Seyoun Lim, Tae-Jin Lee, "Performance Analysis of Self-Scheduling Multi-channel Cognitive MAC Protocols under Imperfect Sensing Environment," International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 327-335, 2015.