Opportunistic spectrum access in cognitive radio networks: when to turn off the spectrum sensors

In cognitive radio networks, spectrum sensing is a critical to both protecting the primary users and creating spectrum access opportunities of secondary users. Channel sensing itself, including active probing and passive listening, often incurs cost, in terms of time overhead, energy consumption, or intrusion to primary users. It is thus not desirable to sense the channel arbitrarily. In this paper, we are motivated to consider the following problem. A secondary user, equipped with spectrum sensors, dynamically accesses a channel. If it transmits without/with colliding with primary users, a certain reward/penalty is obtained. If it senses the channel, accurate channel information is obtained, but a given channel sensing cost incurs. The third option for the user is to turn off the sensor/transmitter and go to sleep mode, where no cost/gain incurs. So when should the secondary user transmit, sense, or sleep, to maximize the total gain? We derive the optimal transmitting, sensing, and sleeping structure, which is a threshold-based policy. Our work sheds light on designing sensing and transmitting scheduling protocols for cognitive radio networks, especially the in-band sensing mechanism in 802.22 networks.