A model for bursty PU channel and its impact on the study of cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we investigate the impact of channels that have a bursty nature in a cognitive radio network scenario. Our goal is to design a general statistical model that can handle bursty primary user (PU) channel usage. The proposed model describes idle periods with a discrete platoon arrival process (PAP) and describes busy periods with a discrete phase type (PH) distribution. This channel model is referred to as a PAP-PH process. We further introduce a proactive access scheme as the potential application of the proposed channel model and use it to compare the performance of the proposed model, in terms of spectrum utilization and interference probability, with two traditionally encountered channel usage models, i.e., the geometrically distributed idle-busy period model and the phase type distributed idle-busy period model, under both bursty and non-bursty channel scenarios. Numerical results show that with the proposed model, the proactive access scheme can guarantee the interference threshold to the PU and can be used for both bursty and non-bursty spectrum use patterns.