An efficient water-filling algorithm for power allocation in OFDM-based cognitive radio systems

In this paper, we present a new water-filling algorithm for power allocation in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) - based cognitive radio systems. The conventional water-filling algorithm cannot be directly employed for power allocation in a cognitive radio system, because there are more power constraints in the cognitive radio power allocation problem than in the classic OFDM system. In this paper, a novel algorithm based on iterative water-filling is presented to overcome such limitations. However, the computational complexity in iterative water-filling is very high. Thus, we explore features of the water-filling algorithm and propose a low-complexity algorithm using power-increment or power-decrement water-filling processes. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms can achieve the optimal power allocation performance in less time than the iterative water-filling algorithms.