Continuous Power Allocation Strategies for Sensing-Based Multiband Spectrum Sharing

We propose continuous power allocation strategies for secondary users (SUs) based on sensing the primary user (PU) channels in a multiband cognitive radio (CR) network. Unlike the conventional sensing-based spectrum sharing, where there are two transmit power levels corresponding to whether the PU is sensed present or not, in the proposed strategy, the power levels are continuous functions of the sensing statistics, and optimized with respect to the achievable rate of the SU. The continuous power allocation function is parameterized by some channel parameters of the PU and SU, and we treat the cases of perfect and quantized channel state information (CSI) separately, where the former provides an upper bound on the achievable rate with full channel information; and the latter constitutes an efficient practical power allocation method for the SU with statistic/partial channel information. The power control process consists of two phases: in the first phase, the SU listens to the multiple bands licensed to the PU and obtains the sensing statistics, e.g., the received signal energies on these bands; in the second phase, the SU adjusts its transmit power levels on these bands based on the sensing results. Optimal power allocation schemes are derived to maximize the achievable rate at the SU under several possible combinations of the peak/average transmit power constraints at the SU and the peak/average interference power constraints at the PU. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategies can significantly improve the achievable throughput of the SU compared to the conventional methods.