Energy efficient relay selection and power allocation for cooperative cognitive radio networks

Owing to environmental, financial and quality of service (QoS) considerations, energy efficient wireless communications have been paid increasing attention under the background of limited energy resource. This study considers a spectrum sharing cognitive radio network, where the primary system leases its radio spectrum to the secondary system for a fraction of time in exchange for secondary users served as relays to assist the transmission of the primary traffic. Based on the cooperative spectrum leasing protocol, the authors formulate a joint optimisation of relay selection and power allocation under QoS requirements to improve energy efficiency (EE). By employing a greedy spectrum sharing (GSS) algorithm, the optimal relay selection, power and sharing time allocation are readily obtained. Monte–Carlo simulations are performed to demonstrate that significant EE improvement is achieved by the proposed GSS algorithm, and that the network performance is enhanced.