A novel spread slotted ALOHA based on cognitive radio for satellite communications system

Cognitive radio (CR) as a promising way to solve the spectrum scarcity allows exploitation of the shared frequency bands while guaranteeing acceptable interference to incumbent users in satellite communication systems. An improved spread slotted ALOHA (SSA) based on multi-user, multi-channel CR model applying to the satellite communications is proposed in this paper. To make full use of the detection information of satellite earth stations, a novel joint collaborative sensing method is used in the sensing phase. Moreover, a better throughput is achieved by using the improved SSA strategy in the transmission phase comparing with the traditional slotted ALOHA (SA). Theoretical analysis shows that the system performs better when SSA is adopted. Theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that the sensing method used in this model outperforms the traditional “hard combining” strategy in the whole sensing process.