An LLR-based Cognitive Transmission Strategy for Higher Spectrum Reutilization

Reutilization of the spectrum licensed to services with low occupancy is of great interest for cognitive radios (CRs). To achieve this goal, we introduce a simple hidden Markov model which captures the primary users activity, signal uncertainties, and noise. For evaluating the performance of any CR, two new criteria are presented entitled spectrum utilization ratio (UR) and interference ratio (IR). Based on this model and new measures, a new a-posterior log-likelihood-ratio based CR is designed and implemented. Its performance is compared with standard energy-detection based spectrum-sensing CR. We demonstrate more than 300% increase in UR for up to 1% allowed interference at the SNR of -5dB.