Performance analysis of arbitrarily-shaped underlay cognitive networks: Effects of secondary user activity protocols

This paper analyzes the performance of the primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) in an arbitrarily-shaped underlay cognitive network. In order to meet the interference threshold requirement for a primary receiver at an arbitrary location, we consider different SU activity protocols that limit the number of active SUs. We propose a framework, based on the moment-generating function of the interference due to a random SU, to analytically compute the outage probability in the primary network, as well as the average number of active SUs in the secondary network. We also propose a cooperation-based SU activity protocol in the underlay cognitive network that includes the existing threshold-based protocol as a special case. We study the average number of active SUs for the different SU activity protocols, subject to a given outage probability constraint at the PU, and we employ it as an analytical approach to compare the effect of different SU activity protocols on the performance of the primary and secondary networks.