Interference Modeling of Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (secondary) networks have been proposed as means to improve the spectrum utilization. A secondary network can reuse the spectrum of a primary network under the condition that the primary services are not harmfully interrupted. In this paper, we study the distribution of the interference power at a primary receiver when the interfering secondary terminals are distributed in a Poisson field. We assume that a secondary terminal is able to cease its transmission if it is within a distance of R to the primary receiver. We derive a general formula for the characteristic function of the random interference generated by such a secondary network. With this general formula we investigate the impacts of R, shadowing, and small scale fading on the probability density function (PDF) of the interference power. We find that when there is no interference region (R = 0), the interference PDFs follow heavy-tailed alpha-stable distributions. In case that a proper interference region is defined by a positive value of R, the tails of the interference power PDFs can be significantly shortened. Moreover, the impacts of shadowing and small scale fading on the interference PDFs are studied and the small scale fading is found to be beneficial in terms of reducing the mean value and outage probability of the interference power.