We address the problem of rapidly discovering spectrum opportunities for seamless service provisioning for secondary users (SUs) in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Specifically, we propose an efficient sensing-sequence that incurs a small opportunity-discovery delay by considering (1) the probability that a spectrum band (or a channel) may be available at the time of sensing, (2) the duration of sensing on a channel, and (3) the channel capacity. We derive the optimal sensing-sequence for channels with homogeneous capacities, and a suboptimal sequence for channels with heterogeneous capacities for which the problem of finding the optimal sensing-sequence is shown to be NP-hard. To support the proposed sensing-sequence, we also propose a channel-management strategy that optimally selects and updates the list of backup channels. A hybrid of maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference is also introduced for flexible estimation of ON/OFF channel-usage patterns and prediction of channel availability when sensing produces infrequent samples. The proposed schemes are evaluated via in-depth simulation. For the scenarios we considered, the proposed suboptimal sequence is shown to achieve close-to-optimal performance, reducing the opportunity-discovery delay by up to 47% over an existing probability-based sequence. The hybrid estimation strategy is also shown to outperform the ML-only strategy by reducing the overall opportunity-discovery delay by up to 34%.
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