  In this paper, we investigate a time-slotted cognitive setting with buffered
primary and secondary users. In order to alleviate the negative effects of
misdetection and false alarm probabilities, a novel design of spectrum access
mechanism is proposed. We propose two schemes. First, the SU senses primary
channel to exploit the periods of silence, if the PU is declared to be idle,
the SU randomly accesses the channel with some access probability $a_s$.
Second, in addition to accessing the channel if the PU is idle, the SU possibly
accesses the channel if it is declared to be busy with some access probability
$b_s$. The access probabilities as function of the misdetection, false alarm
and average primary arrival rate are obtained via solving an optimization
problem designed to maximize the secondary service rate given a constraint on
primary queue stability. In addition, we propose a variable sensing duration
schemes where the SU optimizes over the optimal sensing time to achieve the
maximum stable throughput of the network. The results reveal the performance
gains of the proposed schemes over the conventional sensing scheme. We propose
a method to estimate the mean arrival rate and the outage probability of the PU
based on the primary feedback channel, i.e., acknowledgments (ACKs) and
negative-acknowledgments (NACKs) messages.
