Resource Allocation in Multi-Cluster Cognitive Radio Networks With Energy Harvesting for Hybrid Multi-Channel Access

Cognitive radio and energy harvesting techniques have been able to provide insight for solutions to the inefficiency in spectrum utilization and the effects of the limited storage capacity of energy batteries. Nevertheless, the requirement for interference constraint for primary user (PU) protection, the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the SUs, and the low power density of the ambient electromagnetic waves have restricted the performance of the radio frequency powered cognitive radio networks (RF-CRNs) in terms of the achievable data rate for specific energy budget or sufficient energy budget for target data rate. We are therefore motivated to investigate a radio frequency powered cognitive radio (RF-CR) with the capacity for improved achievable throughput and energy harvesting. Our model consists of multiple PUs and SUs coexisting in a practical overlapping clustered network. In each time frame for the adopted time division multiple access (TDMA) technique, SUs can exploit the multi-user benefit to harvest energy from both the PU and SUs transmissions for improved active probability. Therefore, taken into consideration the heterogeneity of each SUs in terms of their signal-to-noise (SNR), the energy harvesting rates and the inter- and intra-cluster interference, the problem is formulated into a fractional nonlinear optimization to determine the sensing duration, and power allocations that maximize the average energy efficiency of the RF-CRN subject, to constraints on energy causality, and PU protection. The performance of the proposed hybrid multi-channel access scheme is studied in terms of the trade-off between the total achievable throughput by the secondary users and the interference generated among others. Simulation results show that a trade-off exists between achieving optimal spectral efficiency and energy efficiency and, the optimal transmit power therefore depends on the primary design objective. Results equally show that the proposed hybrid multi-channel access scheme outperforms the existing scheme in literature.