Cost-Efficient Cooperative Spectrum Sensing via Utility Maximization

The future wireless services/applications should be provided in a cost-efficient manner due to the limited system resources. Considering the cost efficiency of the cognitive radio (CR) network, we define a utility function which jointly considers the benefit and the cost. The cognitive users (CUs) will get benefit if they are able to utilize the licensed spectrum, while they should pay the cost of system resources such as power consumption. To maximize the utility, an efficient iterative algorithm 1 is proposed to optimize the sensing parameters. Then, we propose an improved cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) scheme in which several adjacent frames are bundled as a block. It is shown that the improved scheme can significantly increase the utility. Then, the cost-efficient transmission under Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraint is considered. An efficient algorithm 2 is proposed to maximize the utility under the CU transmission delay constraint. Finally, we present simulations to evaluate the performance of the improved scheme and discuss the effects of the optimal sensing parameters on the utility.