For Peer Review
1
Joint Power Allocation and Route Selection for
Outage Minimization in Multihop Cognitive Radio
Networks with Energy Harvesting
Avik Banerjee, Student Member, IEEE, Anal Paul, Student Member, IEEE, and Santi P. Maity, Member, IEEE
Abstract—This work explores joint power allocation and route
selection in a multi-hop cognitive radio network consisting of
secondary transmitter and receiver connected through decode-
and-forward relays. A novel frame structure of radio frequency
energy harvesting (EH)-cooperation-transmission is considered
that operates in time switching mode. The relays also help
(cooperation phase) in data transmission between the primary
transmitter and receiver using a fraction of the harvested energy.
An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the end-
to-end secondary outage probability under the constraints of
energy causality and primary user cooperation rate. Closed form
expressions of the optimal time duration for EH and power
allocation factor on each relay are also derived. In order to
minimize the total power consumption (cost) and to enhance
the network lifetime, optimal route selection is also explored
using Bellman-Ford algorithm and the efficacy of the same
over Dijkstra’s algorithm is also demonstrated by a large set
of simulation results. Simulation results also show that a gain in
outage probability ∼ 47.9% and ∼ 55.73% is achieved for the
proposed approach when compared with the existing works.
Index Terms—Cognitive radio, energy harvesting, multihop,
decode-and-forward, outage probability, Bellman-Ford.
I. INTRODUCTION
C
OGNITIVE radio networks (CRNs) look promising to
address the scarcity as well as under utilization of
spectrum by providing an opportunistic communication to the
secondary users (SUs) over the band licensed to the primary
user (PU) [1], [2]. In practical energy constrained scenario,
energy harvesting (EH) based CRN provides a greener alter-
native to harness energy from either ambient radio frequency
(RF) signals or from non-renewable sources like wind, solar,
thermal etc. Since electromagnetic (EM) waves carry both
information and energy, some recent studies [3]–[5] have sug-
gested the scope of utilizing RF signals for EH along with the
information transmission. Two widely used modes are, time
switching (TS) mode [4] where EH and information decoding
(ID) are done in different time slots, the second one is power
splitting (PS) mode [5], where a portion of the received power
is utilized for EH and the remaining part for ID. Relay based
CRN has appeared to enhance the reliability in spectrum
sensing (SS), improvement in SU data transmission rate, aids
in PU transmission etc. over long distance in a power efficient
manner leading to a reduction in interference. Several literature
Avik Banerjee, Anal Paul and Santi P. Maity are with Department of
Information Technology, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technol-
ogy, Shibpur, India, 711103. (e-mail: avikbanerjee@ieee.org, apaul@ieee.org,
santipmaity@it.iiests.ac.in)
highlight the effectiveness of multihop relay assisted CRN
[6], [7] over single-hop network that aids the secondary data
transmission via multiple relays. It is worth mentioning that
relaying scheme suffers from bandwidth inefficiency due to
the need of distinct orthogonal frequency bands for restricting
the mutual interference among the relays [8].
Relays in a multihop CRN operating in an overlay mode
not only forward SU data to its destination but also assist the
PU by forwarding its (PU’s) information signal to the primary
receiver. Therefore, different policies are adopted in various
reports for joint power and channel allocation among the relays
with an objective to minimize the overall secondary outage
probability while maintaining a target PU cooperation rate [9]–
[11]. Furthermore, in an energy constrained scenario, optimal
relay selection in a multihop CRN assists the secondary
transmission by finding a minimum power consumption route
that maintains the energy causality constraint. Several energy
efficient (EE) routing algorithms are reported in the litera-
ture [12]–[15] that find minimal routing path between the
secondary source and destination pair. Here the issues of
optimal power allocation, EH, appropriate frequency/channel
allocation, proper relay (route) selection etc. often need in-
tegration to minimize the secondary outage probability under
the constraints of PU cooperation rate and energy causality.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section
II makes a brief literature review. The system model with
signal flow is presented in Section III while in Section IV,
outage analysis on secondary links are given. In Section V,
the problem formulation and proposed solution are presented
while optimal power cost and network lifetime calculations
are discussed in Section VI. Numerical results are presented
in Section VII and conclusions are in Section VIII.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW AND SCOPE OF WORK
This section makes a literature review on EH, power allo-
cation and route selection in multi-hop CRN. Kalamkar and
Banerjee [4] derived a closed form expression of the secondary
outage probability adopting a TS policy based relay assisted
CRN with scope of EH (from the interference of PU) and
information decoding over time. Han et al. [16] achieved both
energy and spectrum efficiency (SE) in their joint optimization
framework of EH and SS. He et al. [17] derived a closed form
expression of outage probability considering a cooperative
CRN with EH where the secondary relay maintains the quality
of service (QoS) for both the PU and the secondary network.
Page 1 of 31
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking
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