Cognitive radio has been recently proposed to dynamically access unused-spectrum. Since the spectrum availability for opportunistic access is determined by spectrum sensing, sensing is identified as one of the most crucial issues of cognitive radio networks. The PHY-layer sensing, as a part of spectrum sensing in cognitive radio, concerns the sensing mechanism to determine channel to be sensed and to access. One of the important issues in the PHY-layer sensing control is to find an available sensing period and trade-off between spectrum sensing and data transmission. In this paper, we show the relationship between spectrum sensing and data transmission according to the sensing period. We analyze and propose the new scheme to evaluate optimal sensing period.