On the impact of the primary network activity on the achievable capacity of spectrum sharing over fading channels

When utilizing spectrum sharing in wireless channels, a secondary service may access the spectrum allocated to the primary service while this frequency band is under-utilized. The availability of the frequency band to the secondary user is a function of the activity of the users in the primary network. In this paper, we analyze the achievable capacity of the secondary service which employs opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) over a fading environment based on the primary network activity. We categorized OSA methods into Access Limited OSA (AL-OSA), and interference limited OSA (IL-OSA) schemes. In AL-OSA the spectrum is shared with the secondary service in circumstances in which the primary service is totally inactive however, in IL-OSA access to the spectrum is allowed subject to an interference threshold. For both cases we develop analytical frameworks to analyze the impact of the primary network activity on the achievable capacity of the secondary service. Simulation results confirm our analysis and also show that in cases where higher activity is in the primary network, IL-OSA is the more appropriate OSA method. For a less active primary network, AL-OSA is shown to performs better with respect to the achievable capacity.