Energy-efficient power allocation for cognitive radio networks with joint overlay and underlay spectrum access mechanism

Abstract

Traditional designs of cognitive radio (CR) focus on maximizing system throughput. In this paper, we study the joint overlay and underlay power allocation problem for orthogonal frequency-division multiple access-based CR. Instead of maximizing system throughput, we aim to maximize system energy efficiency (EE), measured by a "bit per Joule" metric, while maintaining the minimal rate requirement of a given CR system, under the total power constraint of a secondary user and interference constraints of primary users. The formulated energy-efficient power allocation (EEPA) problem is nonconvex; to make it solvable, we first transform the original problem into a convex optimization problem via fractional programming, and then the Lagrange dual decomposition method is used to solve the equivalent convex optimization problem. Finally, an optimal EEPA allocation scheme is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed method can achieve better EE performance.