Outage Capacity for Secondary Users Due to Bandwidth Fluctuations: Multicarrier Versus Single Carrier

In this work we study the channel capacity from the point of view of a secondary user that shares the bandwidth of the channel with a primary user using dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radio.The secondary user sees bandwidth fluctuations (i.e, at any given time the bandwidth can be available or not) that impact its channel capacity. We study the outage capacity for the secondary user considering two scenarios in which the secondary user uses either a single carrier modulation for the case in which bandwidth fluctuates over the complete transmission band, and a multicarrier modulation for the case in which bandwidth fluctuations are over various transmission subbands. We derive expressions for the outage capacity of the secondary user for both single carrier and multicarrier. Results show that: (1) The outage capacity for single carrier can be higher than for multicarrier, but with a higher outage probability for single carrier than for multicarrier. In fact, a low value of outage probability for single carrier requires a duty cycle for the secondary user close to one, but this has the problem that it leaves a very short duty cycle for the primary user. (2) Although for the secondary user the outage capacity for multicarrier is smaller than for single carrier, for multicarrier lower values of the outage probability can be achieved even for short values of the duty cycle of the secondary user, allowing larger duty cycle values of the primary user. (3) For multicarrier, the outage capacity is more sensitive to changes in the duty cycle than to changes in the outage probability. To obtain a larger outage capacity with low values of both the outage probability and the duty cycle, it requires the use of a large number of subbands.