Spectrum Handoff in Cognitive Radio Networks:
Opportunistic and Negotiated Situations
Yan Zhang
Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
Email: yanzhang@ieee.org
Abstract—Spectrum handoff is an indispensable component
in cognitive radio networks to provide resilient service for
the secondary users. In this paper, we explore the spectrum
handoff procedure and then propose four metrics to characterize
both short-term and long-term spectrum handoff performance:
link maintenance probability, the number of spectrum handoff,
switching delay, and non-completion probability. In particular,
the probability mass function (pmf) and the average number
of spectrum handoff are developed. The tele-traffic parameters
are relaxed to follow a general distribution function, which will
enable a wide applicability and theoretical significance of the
derived formulae. Both opportunistic and negotiated spectrum
access strategies are investigated. Results show that these two
mechanisms will generate significantly different performance.
Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the perfor-
mance trade-off and the interaction between the primary users
and the secondary users. The impact of key parameters on
spectrum handoff is also discussed. The techniques as well as
the results are important for evaluating the primary and second
users co-existence, and hence helpful for design and optimization
of cognitive radio networks.
Index Terms—Cognitive Radio, Spectrum Handoff, Switching
Delay, Primary System, Primary User, Secondary User
I. INTRODUCTION
Spectrum is a scarce and precious resource in wireless
communications. The scarcity challenge is largely caused by
the current fixed frequency assignment policy. This policy
partitions the whole s pectrum into a large number of different
ranges. Each piece is exclusively specified for a specific sys-
tem. Recent measurement shows an undesirable situation that
some wireless systems may only use the allocated spectrum
to a very limited extent while others are heavily used [1]
[2]. Motivated by this observation, Cognitive Radio (CR) has
been proposed to effectively utilize the spectrum. CR refers
to the potentiality that wireless systems are context-aware and
capable of reconfiguration based on the surrounding environ-
ments and their own properties [3] [4] [5] [6]. In the same
frequency range, there are two co-existing systems: primary
system and secondary system. Primary system refers to the
licensed system with legacy spectrum. This system has the
exclusive privilege to access the assigned spectrum. Secondary
system refers to the unlicensed cognitive system and can only
opportunistically access the spectrum holes which are not
used by the primary system. We call the subscriber in the
primary system as Primary User (PU) and the subscriber in the
secondary system as Secondary User (SU). The SUs are able
to dynamically access the licensed frequency bands without
any modification to the primary system.
Although the motivation of CR technology is simple, the
design and implementation have a large number of challenges.
Spectrum handoff is a major difficulty and also an inherent
capability to support reliable service. There are two phases
in spectrum handoff: PU detection and link maintenance. On
detecting a PU appearance, the SU has to vacate the frequency
for the PU. After the channel release, the SU will perform the
link maintenance to re-construct the communications in order
to avoid service termination. During this procedure, the SU
may search the spectral band and transfer its communications
to another available spectrum, if available. This procedure is
referred as spectrum handoff. Recently, there are few studies
on the spectrum handoff issue. In the study [10], Guipponi
et al. proposed a fuzzy-based spectrum handoff algorithm. In
the work [7], Wang et al. studied the impact of spectrum
handoff on the link maintenance when an SU vacates a
channel due to PU appearance. In the s tudy [9], Jo et al.
reported the spectrum matching algorithms for SUs in order
to reduce the spectrum handoff probability. It is observed that,
in these studies, spectrum handoff performance has not been
comprehensively proposed, developed, and discussed.
In this paper, our contributions include three folds. These
aspects also represent the major difference from the existed
studies. Firstly, we proposed four performance metrics in
order to completely characterize spectrum handoff: the number
of spectrum handoff, link maintenance probability, switching
delay, and non-completion probability. Secondly, the key tele-
traffic parameters in both the primary system and the sec-
ondary system are generalized. This will enable a wide appli-
cability and theoretical significance of the derived formulae.
The interaction between the primary user and the secondary
user is presented and discussed. Thirdly, both opportunistic
and negotiated situations (see Section II.A) on the PU and SU
co-existence are considered. This investigation is motivated by
the possibility that the spectrum handoff may be affected by
different spectrum access strategies. Numerical examples are
presented to exploit the interaction between the parameters and
performance; and also the trade-off among the performance
metrics.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section
II presents the system model. Section III and Section IV
report the spectrum handoff performance in the opportunistic
and negotiated situations, respectively. Section IV presents the
illustrative numerical results. Section V concludes the work.
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the IEEE ICC 2009 proceedings
978-1-4244-3435-0/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE
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