Joint Optimal Spectrum Sensing and Power Allocation in CDMA-Based Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we investigate the power allocation issue for cooperative-sensing-based code-division multiple access (CDMA) cognitive radio (CR) networks. We consider a network consisting of multiple secondary users (SUs) and a secondary base station (BS) implementing a two-phase protocol. In the first phase, censor-based cooperative spectrum sensing is carried out to detect the PU's presence. When the channel is estimated to be free, SUs transmit data in the uplink to the BS in the second phase by using CDMA. We optimize the sensing parameters and transmit power of SUs jointly to minimize the total energy consumption with the constraints on SUs' quality of service (QoS) and detection probability of the PU. This is a nonconvex problem, which we represent as a monotonic optimization problem and solve by means of monotonic programming. Furthermore, we study the separate optimization problem in which sensing parameters and transmit power are optimized to minimize the energy consumption of the first phase and the second phase disjointly. Numerical results show that the proposed joint optimization method saves energy consumption significantly in lower signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). It can introduce as high as 3.9 and 8.7 dB joule energy saving per time slot in zero-sensing SNR under the same data rate constraints of 0.5 and 1 bit/s/Hz, respectively.