A robust power control method for Cognitive Radio Networks

One of the issues in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) is how to manage the transmit powers of the secondary users to achieve the best network performance while preserving the interference on the primary users below an acceptable level. Link failures, node mobility and changing interference level make robustness a challenging issue in CRN. In this paper, considering robustness as the optimization criterion for power management, we minimize Network Criticality, a recently developed robustness metric, with primary users´ interference requirements and total capacity concavity as the constraints. Our method is carried out on a decentralized strategy distributed in secondary nodes. We show that the proposed method not only provides stability to the power control mechanism but also improves network performance in terms of capacity increase.