Joint Relay Scheduling, Channel Access, and Power Allocation for Green Cognitive Radio Communications

The capacity of cognitive radio (CR) systems can be enhanced significantly by deploying relay nodes to exploit the spatial diversity. However, the inevitable imperfect sensing in CR has vital effects on the policy of relay selection, channel access, and power allocation that play pivotal roles in the system capacity. The increase in transmission power can improve the system capacity, but results in high energy consumption, which incurs the increase of carbon emission and network operational cost. Most of the existing schemes for CR systems have not jointly considered the imperfect sensing scenario and the tradeoff between the system capacity and energy consumption. To fill in this gap, this paper proposes an energy-aware centralized relay selection scheme that takes into account the relay selection, channel access, and power allocation jointly in CR with imperfect sensing. Specifically, the CR system is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) to achieve the goal of balancing the system capacity and energy consumption as well as maximizing the system reward. The optimal policy for relay selection, channel access, and power allocation is then derived by virtue of a dynamic programming approach. A dimension reduction strategy is further applied to reduce its high computation complexity. Extensive simulation experiments and results are presented and analysed to demonstrate the significant performance improvement compared to the existing schemes. The performance results show that the received reward increases more than 50% and the network lifetime increases more than 35%, but the system capacity is reduced less than 6% only.