Energy Efficiency Optimization for OFDM-Based Cognitive Radio Systems: A Water-Filling Factor Aided Search Method

Conventional designs of OFDM-based cognitive radio (CR) systems mainly focus on the system throughput. Since nowdays the energy efficiency (EE) of wireless systems becomes more and more important, this paper intends to improve the system throughput for unit-energy consumption in OFDM-based CR systems. The energy-efficient power allocation problem of OFDM-based CR systems is studied under the total power constraint, the interference power constraint and the rate constraint. Since the energy-efficient power allocation problem is non-convex, in order to find the optimal power allocation at each subcarrier, we propose a novel method named water-filling factors aided search (WFAS) to solve the EE optimization problems with multiple constraints. The global ε-optimality and the convergence of the proposed method are presented. The numerical results confirm the theoretical conclusions. The comparisons of the energy-efficient power allocation and the spectrum-efficient power allocation in OFDM-based CR systems are given under different constraints via numerical simulations as well.