System Utility Maximization With Interference Processing for Cognitive Radio Networks

In spectrum underlay cognitive radio networks, secondary users (SUs) are allowed to reuse the spectrum allocated to a primary system. The interference between SUs actually carries information and can potentially be exploited to improve the network performance through information-theoretic interference processing. In this paper, we design an optimal joint power and rate control algorithm that maximizes the secondary system utility subject to the interference temperature constraints of primary users based on the capacity-approaching interference processing scheme called as the Han-Kobayashi scheme. The optimal solution is difficult to achieve because the optimization problem is in general non-convex. To make the optimization problem tractable, this paper first transforms the problem into a monotonic optimization problem through exploiting its hidden monotonicity. We then devise an effective algorithm to obtain the global optimal solution to the joint power and rate control problem in the Han-Kobayashi scheme. The key idea behind the proposed algorithm is to construct a sequence of shrinking polyblocks that approximate the upper boundary of the feasible region with increasing precision. Numerical results further show that the achieved utility of our scheme significantly outperforms the utility of conventional schemes which treat the interference between SUs as the noise.