Intelligent Approaches for Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in the Cognitive Radio Network

Abstract

The cognitive radio (CR) is evolved as the promising technology to alleviate the spectrum scarcity issues by allowing the secondary users (SUs) to use the licensed band in an opportunistic manner. Various challenges need to be addressed before the successful deployment of CR technology. This thesis work presents intelligent resource allocation techniques for improving energy efficiency (EE) of low battery powered CR nodes where resources refer to certain important parameters that directly or indirectly affect EE. As far as the primary user (PU) is concerned, the SUs are allowed to transmit on the licensed band until their transmission power would not cause any interference to the primary network. Also, the SUs must use the licensed band efficiently during the PU’s absence. Therefore, the two key factors such as protection to the primary network and throughput above the threshold are important from the PU’s and SUs’ perspective, respectively. In deployment of CR, malicious users may be more active to prevent the CR users from accessing the spectrum or cause unnecessary interference to the both primary and secondary transmission. Considering these aspects, this thesis focuses on developing novel approaches for energy-efficient resource allocation under the constraints of interference to the PR, minimum achievable data rate and maximum transmission power by optimizing the resource parameters such as sensing time and the secondary transmission power with suitably selecting SUs.
Two different domains considered in this thesis are the soft decision fusion (SDF)-based cooperative spectrum sensing CR network (CRN) models without and with the primary user emulation attack (PUEA). An efficient iterative algorithm called iterative Dinkelbach method (IDM) is proposed to maximize EE with suitable SUs in the absence of the attacker. In the proposed approaches, different constraints are evaluated considering the negative impact of the PUE attacker on the secondary transmission while maximizing EE with the PUE attacker. The optimization problem associated with the non-convex constraints is solved by our proposed iterative resource allocation algorithms (novel iterative resource allocation (NIRA) and novel adaptive resource allocation (NARA)) with suitable selection of SUs for jointly optimizing the sensing time and power allocation. In the CR enhanced vehicular ad hoc network (CR-VANET), the time varying channel responses with the vehicular movement are considered without and with the attacker. In the absence of the PUE attacker, an interference-aware power allocation scheme based on normalized least mean square (NLMS) algorithm is proposed to maximize EE considering the dynamic constraints. In the presence of the attacker, the optimization problem associated with the non-convex and time-varying constraints is solved by an efficient approach based on genetic algorithm (GA). Further, an investigation is attempted to apply the CR technology in industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band through spectrum occupancy prediction, sub-band selection and optimal power allocation to the CR users using the real time indoor measurement data. Efficacies of the proposed approaches are verified through extensive simulation studies in the MATLAB environment and by comparing with the existing literature. Further, the impacts of different network parameters on the system performance are analyzed in detail. The proposed approaches will be highly helpful in designing energy-efficient CRN model with low complexity for future CR deployment.