—In a cognitive radio network, opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) to the underutilized spectrum involves not only sensing the spectrum occupancy but also probing the channel quality in order to identify an idle and good channel for data transmission—particularly if a large number of channels is open for secondary spectrum reuse. Although such a joint mechanism, referred to as active sensing, may improve the OSA performance due to diversity, it inevitably incurs additional energy consumption. In this paper, we consider a wideband cognitive radio network with limited available frame energy and treat a fundamental energy allocation problem: how available energy should be optimally allocated for sensing, probing, and data transmission to maximize the achievable average OSA throughput. By casting this problem into the multiarmed bandit framework under probably approximately correct (PAC) learning, we put forth a proactive strategy for determining the optimal sensing cardinality (the nu...
Thang Van Nguyen, Hyundong Shin, Tony Q. S. Quek,