Cooperation for optimal demand response in cognitive radio enabled smart grid

Demand response management (DRM) is envisaged to play a key role in the smart grid operation, which requires reliable communications between power providers and consumers. To reduce communication cost, the cognitive radio technique is proposed to transmit the meter data from consumers to the control center. Unlike most existing studies on cognitive enabled smart grid, where only individual spectrum sensing is considered, in this paper, both cooperative spectrum sensing and harvested renewable energy are incorporated. The tradeoff between spectrum sensing cost and the DRM management gain makes the optimization of cooperation scheme a challenging research problem. To solve the problem, we analytically study the degradation of communication reliability of the renewable energy supplied consumers who attend the cooperative sensing as well as the DRM gain obtained by the communication improvement. Further, the optimization problem of selecting the number of cooperative consumers is formulated. We prove that there exists a unique optimal cooperative number under some constraints and propose an efficient searching algorithm. Numerical results are presented to validate our theoretical analysis.