2366 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 12, NO. 5, MAY 2013
Energy Efficiency Optimization for
OFDM-Based Cognitive Radio Systems:
A Water-Filling Factor Aided Search Method
Junling Mao, Gang Xie, Member, IEEE, Jinchun Gao, Member, IEEE, and Yuanan Liu, Member, IEEE
Abstract—Conventional designs of OFDM-based cognitive ra-
dio (CR) systems mainly focus on the system throughput. Since
nowdays the energy efficiency (EE) of wireless systems becomes
more and more important, this paper intends to improve the
system throughput for unit-energy consumption in OFDM-based
CR systems. The energy-efficient power allocation problem of
OFDM-based CR systems is studied under the total power
constraint, the interference power constraint and the rate con-
straint. Since the energy-efficient power allocation problem is
non-convex, in order to find the optimal power allocation at
each subcarrier, we propose a novel method named water-
filling factors aided search (WFAS) to solve the EE optimization
problems with multiple constraints. The global ε-optimality
and the convergence of the proposed method are presented.
The numerical results confirm the theoretical conclusions. The
comparisons of the energy-efficient power allocation and the
spectrum-efficient power allocation in OFDM-based CR systems
are given under different constraints via numerical simulations
as well.
Index Terms—Energy efficiency, Cognitive radio, OFDM,
Power allocation.
I. INTRODUCTION
C
OGNITIVE Radio (CR) techniq ue h as drawn consider-
able attentions due to its advantages of spectrum reusing
[1]. In CR networks, the secondary users (SUs) communicate
over the bandwidth originally allocated to the primary network
while assuring that the resulted performance degradation of the
active primary transmissions is tolerable [2].
One popular transmission scheme of CR networks is called
opportunistic spectrum access (OSA), which allows SUs com-
municate over the spectrum hole where the primary trans-
mission is de tected to be inactive [2]. Since the primary
transmission state usually changes with time, to support the
OSA scheme, the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) technique has been adopted in broadband CR net-
works due to its flexibility in dynamic spectrum access [3].
Manuscript received July 12, 2012; revised November 13, 2012; accepted
January 9, 2013. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper
and approving it for publication was S. Affes.
This work was supported in part by Canada-China Scientific and Techno-
logical Cooperation (No. 2010DFA11320), the Natural Science Foundation of
China (Nos. 60973111 and 61170275), and Important National Science and
Technology Scientific Projects (No. 2012ZX03003001-004).
J. Mao, J. Gao, and Y. Liu are with the Beijing Key Laboratory of Work
Safety Intelligent Monitoring, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommuni-
cations, Beijing 100876, China (e-mail: maojunling@bupt.edu.cn).
G. Xie is with the Beijing Key Laboratory of Network System Architecture
and Conv e rgence, Beijing Uni versity of Posts and Telecommunications.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2013.013013.121013
However even though SUs transmit over the spectrum hole in
OFDM-based CR systems, the mutual interference between
the secondary systems and the primary systems still exists
when the primary bands and the CR bands are side-by-side [4].
Thus, the power control for OFDM-based CR systems should
be adopted to ensure the interference caused by secondary
transmission below a pre-defined value.
In previous works, most power allocation schemes for
OFDM-based CR systems intend to improve the system
throughput (or spectrum efficiency (SE)) [5]-[10]. [5] and
[6] give the optimal and suboptimal power allocation for
OFDM-based CR systems under the single interference power
constraint. [7] gives the optimal power allocation for overlay
and underlay OFDM-based CR systems under multiple in-
terference p ower constraints. [8] studies the joint power and
bits allocation schemes. [9] considers the power allocation for
OFDM-based CR systems with imperfect spectrum sensing.
[10] studies the joint optimization of detection threshold and
the power allocation.
Besides the SE, the energy efficiency (EE) has been consid-
ered more and more important in future wireless systems [11]-
[15]. It is reported that wireless and mobile communications
account for more than 9% of the global carbon dioxide
emissions originated from information and communication
technologies (ICT) [11] and more than 50% of the total energy
consumption is consumed by the radio access part, where 50-
80% is used for the power amplifier (PA) [15]. Therefore, the
transmit power adaption is very important to improve the EE
of wireless systems. The EE optimization for OFDM-based
non-CR systems has been studied in [16]-[23]. [16] solves the
EE optimization problem via seeing the transmit power as a
function of transmit rate. [17] points that the EE optimization
problem can also be solved via seeing the transmit rate as a
function of transmit power. [18] gives another way for EE op-
timization, which is named fractional programming [19]. [20]
further introduces the fractional programming method into
EE optimization. [21] and [22] consider th e EE optimization
of OFDM-based non-CR systems with additional minimum
rate constraint. [23] considers the EE optimization of non-CR
OFDMA systems with minimum rate constraint for each user.
Owing to the importance of EE, in OFDM-based CR
systems, the EE optimization should also be considered. [24]
studies an energy-efficient power allocation f or OFDM-based
CR systems, where the objective function is not the system
throughput for unit-energy consumption [25] as in [16]-[23]
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