Performance Evaluation of the Effect of Primary Users on the Rendezvous process for Cognitive Radios

The Rendezvous process is an essential process for establishing a communication link between two nodes in cognitive radio networks. A number of rendezvous protocols have been developed in the last few years. However, many protocols ignore one of the basic constraints of cognitive radio networks which is the impact of the primary users (PUs) on the performance of the rendezvous process. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to evaluate such impact. The ordinary residual time process is used to develop this model. The results, which are validated by the simulation results, show that the primary user activity cannot be ignored and it affects negatively the time to rendezvous (TTR) between two nodes.