Opportunistic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Queueing Analytic Model and Admission Controller Design

Cognitive radio (CR) technology is an innovative radio design philosophy in order to increase the spectrum utilization by exploiting the unused spectrum in dynamically changing environments. Specifically, the CR technology will allow a group of potential users (referred to as secondary users) to access available spectrum resources unused by primary users (PUs) for whom the band has been licensed. The spectrum available for secondary users (SUs) depends on PUs' activity in the licensed spectrum. In this paper, we develop a queuing analytic framework to study important performance measures experienced by SUs in a CR network. We study queuing delay and buffer statistics of SUs' packets by modeling PUs' activity as a two state Markov chain and SUs' channel quality variation as a finite state Markov chain (FSMC). In order to allocate available channels among the SUs, an opportunistic channel allocation scheme is considered. The proposed framework facilitates to design an admission controller for SUs' network in order to maintain a given quality service (QoS) requirement which is specified in the form of statistical delay guarantee.