A Joint Information and Energy Cooperation Framework for CR-Enabled Macro–Femto Heterogeneous Networks

With the ubiquitous demand for wireless communications, researchers have studied heterogeneous networks (HetNets) for years. Often the HetNets include a macrocell base station (MBS), several sets of macrocell users (MUs), a large number of femtocell base stations (FBSs), and femtocell users (secondary users), where the femtocells help the macrocell system relay the uplink or downlink traffic between the MUs and the MBS. In this article, we propose a novel joint information and energy cooperation method, with the aim of enhancing the spectrum and energy efficiency (EE) for cognitive HetNets. Specifically, the MUs and the femtocells harvest wireless energy from the radio frequency signal transmitted by MBS. By using the harvested energy, femtocells obtain the transmission opportunity to forward the signals of their serving users. We theoretically derive the theoretical expressions of the outage probabilities of the primary link as well as the secondary link. Then, we focus on investigating how to maximize EE by jointly considering time allocation and power control. Furthermore, we formulate the EE maximization problem, which contains the fractional form objective function and the linear inequality constraints and hence is nonconvex. To resolve this, we integrate the Dinkelbach method with convex optimization to derive the tractable and optimal solution. The numerical results demonstrate the simulations well match our theoretical analysis. Moreover, the results validate the feasibility of the proposed method for high-quality transmission without incurring extra energy consumption.