A consensus approach for cooperative communications in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we investigate a decentralized power allocation (PA) algorithm, i.e., without the need of a fusion center, for a coalition of bit-interleaved coded (BIC) OFDM-based cognitive radio (CR) devices. Taking advantages of a game theoretical description for our problem, it is shown that the reliability of the secondary cooperative link can be remarkably improved through a simple average consensus algorithm keeping the interference produced to the primary users (PUs) under a prescribed threshold. Finally, the performance gain of the proposed PA policy is highlighted comparing it with conventional power allocation algorithms.