Primary-User Mobility Impact on Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, the effects of the primary-user (PU) mobility on spectrum sensing in Cognitive Radio (CR) networks are studied. To this aim, first, the spectrum sensing problem is reformulated to account for the PU mobility. Then, the effects of the PU mobility are studied with the objective to determine the parameters that affect the spectrum sensing functionality. For this, two performance metrics are analytically derived: i) the detection capability, which measures the PU mobility impact on the CR user detection probability; ii) the mobility-enabled sensing capacity, a new metric that measures the expected transmission capacity achievable by a CR user in the presence of PU mobility. The mathematical analysis is carried out in different scenarios, by using mobility and spectrum occupancy models. The results show that the detection capability is affected by five parameters: the PU protection range, the network region size, the PU mobility model, the CR spatial distribution, and the number of PUs that use the same spectrum band. Moreover, it is shown that the sensing capacity can significantly increase in the presence of PU mobility if the PU protection range is smaller than the network region size. The mathematical results are derived by considering the dynamic PU traffic, and validated through simulations.