Effective Capacity of Cognitive Radio Links: Accessing Primary Feedback Erroneously

Abstract: We study the performance of a cognitive system modeled by one secondary and one primary link and operating under statistical quality of service (QoS) delay constraints. We analyze the effective capacity (EC) to quantify the secondary user (SU) performance under delay constraints. The SU intends to maximize the benefit of the feedback messages on the primary link to reduce SU interference for primary user (PU) and makes opportunistic use of the channel to transmit his packets. We assume that SU has erroneous access to feedback information of PU. We propose a three power level scheme and study the tradeoff between degradation in EC of SU and reliability of PU defined as the success rate of the transmitted packets. Our analysis shows that increase in error in feedback access causes more interference to PU and packet success rate decreases correspondingly.