Green collaboration in cognitive radio cellular networks with roaming and spectrum trading

In this paper, we propose a new cognitive cellular network architecture based on the coexistence of primary and secondary networks, (PN) and (SN), respectively. The PN aims to minimize its energy consumption by switching off the maximum number of its BSs and offloading its users to the SN´s infrastructure to maintain its QoS. In return, the PN pays a roaming price and permits the SN to share or lease the spectrum at a certain price. We propose a low-complexity algorithm allowing the PN to minimize its energy consumption by selecting a suboptimal combination of active base stations. Our algorithm also optimizes the resource allocation of the SN to maximize its total sum-rate while respecting the minimal profit constraints for both networks. In the numerical results, we show that our proposed algorithm achieves close performances to the optimal exhaustive search algorithm. In addition, we investigate the impact of various system parameters in the collaboration decision.