On Optimal Offline Time Sharing Policy for Energy Harvesting Underlay Cognitive Radio

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal offline time sharing policy for energy harvesting in underlay cognitive radio systems, maximizing secondary user data rate while protecting primary user interference, and compares it with an online policy.

Contribution

It formulates and solves a convex optimization problem for optimal offline time sharing and power allocation in RF energy harvesting cognitive radios, a novel approach.

Findings

Optimal offline scheme outperforms online policy in sum rate.

Derived closed-form solutions for time sharing and power allocation.

Validated the effectiveness through simulations.

Abstract

RF energy harvesting can be used to power communication devices so that perpetual operation of such devices can be ensured. We consider a RF energy harvesting underlay cognitive radio system operating in slotted fashion. The primary user (PU) is equipped with a reliable power source and transmits with a constant power in all the slots. However, the secondary user (SU) harvests energy from primary's transmission and simultaneously transmits it's own data such that interference at the primary receiver (PR) remains below an acceptable threshold. At the secondary transmitter (ST), each time slot is divided into two phases: energy harvesting (EH) phase and information transfer (IT) phase. We formulated the problem of maximizing the achievable secondary sum rate under primary receiver's protection criteria as a convex optimization problem and obtained the optimal time sharing between EH and IT phase, and optimal secondary transmit power under offline setting. The optimal offline scheme is then compared with an online myopic policy, where the optimal time sharing between EH and IT phase, and optimal secondary transmit power are obtained based on instantaneous channel gains only.