Analysis of secondary user performance in cognitive radio networks with reactive spectrum handoff

Cognitive radio networks use dynamic spectrum access of secondary users (SUs) to deal with the problem of radio spectrum scarcity . In this paper, we investigate the SU performance in cognitive radio networks with reactive-decision spectrum handoff. During transmission, a SU may get interrupted several times due to the arrival of primary (licensed) users. After each interruption in the reactive spectrum handoff, the SU performs spectrum sensing to determine an idle channel for retransmission. We develop two continuous-time Markov chain models with and without an absorbing state to study the impact of system parameters such as sensing time and sensing room size on several SU performance measures. These measures include the mean delay of a SU, the variance of the SU delay, the SU interruption probability, the average number of interruptions that a SU experiences, the probability of a SU getting discarded from the system after an interruption and the SU blocking probability upon arrival.