Outage Probability Analysis of Cognitive Transmissions: Impact of Spectrum Sensing Overhead

In cognitive radio networks, a cognitive source node requires two essential phases to complete a cognitive transmission process: the phase of spectrum sensing with a certain time duration (also referred to as spectrum sensing overhead) to detect a spectrum hole and the phase of data transmission through the detected spectrum hole. In this paper, we focus on the outage probability analysis of cognitive transmissions by considering the two phases jointly to examine the impact of spectrum sensing overhead on system performance. A closed-form expression of an overall outage probability that accounts for both the probability of no spectrum hole detected and the probability of a channel outage is derived for cognitive transmissions over Rayleigh fading channels. We further conduct an asymptotic outage analysis in high signal-to-noise ratio regions and obtain an optimal spectrum sensing overhead solution to minimize the asymptotic outage probability. Besides, numerical results show that a minimized overall outage probability can be achieved through a tradeoff in determining the time durations for the spectrum hole detection and data transmission phases. In this paper, we also investigate the use of cognitive relay to improve the outage performance of cognitive transmissions. We show that a significant improvement is achieved by the proposed cognitive relay scheme in terms of the overall outage probability.