Low complexity power loading scheme in cognitive radio networks: FBMC capability

Quick development of wireless communication makes the spectrum scarcity as a one of the serious problems. Cognitive radio (CR) is considered to be one of the possible solutions to solve the spectrum efficiency problem. Multicarrier communications are considered to be used in CR networks. Due to its high spectral efficiency, filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) can be considered as an alternative to conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for transmission over the CR networks. This paper addresses the problem of resource allocation in multicarrier based CR networks. The objective is to maximize the downlink capacity of the network under both total power and interference introduced to the primary users (PU´s) constraints. The optimal solution has high computational complexity which makes it unsuitable for practical applications and hence a low complexity suboptimal solution is proposed. The performance of using FBMC instead of OFDM in CR systems is investigated. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed resource allocation algorithm with low computational complexity achieves near optimal performance and prove the efficiency of using FBMC in CR context.