Energy Efficient Spectrum Sensing and Handoff Strategies in Cognitive Radio Networks

TL;DR

This paper reviews energy-efficient spectrum sensing and handoff strategies in cognitive radio networks, highlighting the tradeoffs and identifying key areas for future research to optimize energy use without compromising performance.

Contribution

It classifies existing energy-efficient spectrum sensing and handoff approaches and analyzes the tradeoffs involved, emphasizing the need for further research in fairness and dynamic schemes.

Findings

Tradeoff between energy consumption and throughput analyzed

Classification of existing energy-efficient spectrum sensing approaches

Identification of research gaps in fairness and dynamic strategies

Abstract

The limited spectrum resources and dramatic growth of high data rate communications have motivated opportunistic spectrum access using the promising concept of cognitive radio networks. Although this concept has emerged primarily to enhance spectrum utilization, the importance of energy consumption poses new challenges, because energy efficiency and communication performance can be at odds. In this paper, the existing approaches to energy efficiency spectrum sensing and handoff are classified. The tradeoff between energy consumption and throughput is established as function of the numerous design parameters of cognitive radio networks, both in the case of local and of cooperative spectrum sensing. It is argued that a number of important aspects still needs to be researched, such as fairness, dynamic behavior, reactive and proactive schemes for energy efficiency.