Generalized Area Spectral Efficiency: An Effective Performance Metric for Green Wireless Communications

Area spectral efficiency (ASE) was introduced as a metric to quantify the spectral utilization efficiency of cellular systems. Unlike other performance metrics, ASE takes into account the spatial property of cellular systems. In this paper, we generalize the concept of ASE to study arbitrary wireless transmissions. Specifically, we introduce the notion of affected area to characterize the spatial property of arbitrary wireless transmissions. Based on the definition of affected area, we define the performance metric, generalized area spectral efficiency (GASE), to quantify the spatial spectral utilization efficiency as well as the greenness of wireless transmissions. After illustrating its evaluation for point-to-point transmission, we analyze the GASE performance of several different transmission scenarios, including dual-hop relay transmission, three-node cooperative relay transmission and underlay cognitive radio transmission. We derive closed-form expressions for the GASE metric of each transmission scenario under Rayleigh fading environment whenever possible. Through mathematical analysis and numerical examples, we show that the GASE metric provides a new perspective on the design and optimization of wireless transmissions, especially on the transmitting power selection. We also show that introducing relay nodes can greatly improve the spatial utilization efficiency of wireless systems. We illustrate that the GASE metric can help optimize the deployment of underlay cognitive radio systems.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, accepted by TCo

Multiband Spectrum Access: Great Promises for Future Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio has been widely considered as one of the prominent solutions to tackle the spectrum scarcity. While the majority of existing research has focused on single-band cognitive radio, multiband cognitive radio represents great promises towards implementing efficient cognitive networks compared to single-based networks. Multiband cognitive radio networks (MB-CRNs) are expected to significantly enhance the network's throughput and provide better channel maintenance by reducing handoff frequency. Nevertheless, the wideband front-end and the multiband spectrum access impose a number of challenges yet to overcome. This paper provides an in-depth analysis on the recent advancements in multiband spectrum sensing techniques, their limitations, and possible future directions to improve them. We study cooperative communications for MB-CRNs to tackle a fundamental limit on diversity and sampling. We also investigate several limits and tradeoffs of various design parameters for MB-CRNs. In addition, we explore the key MB-CRNs performance metrics that differ from the conventional metrics used for single-band based networks.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures; published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Journal, Special Issue on Future Radio Spectrum Access, March 201

Energy Efficiency in MIMO Underlay and Overlay Device-to-Device Communications and Cognitive Radio Systems

This paper addresses the problem of resource allocation for systems in which a primary and a secondary link share the available spectrum by an underlay or overlay approach. After observing that such a scenario models both cognitive radio and D2D communications, we formulate the problem as the maximization of the secondary energy efficiency subject to a minimum rate requirement for the primary user. This leads to challenging non-convex, fractional problems. In the underlay scenario, we obtain the global solution by means of a suitable reformulation. In the overlay scenario, two algorithms are proposed. The first one yields a resource allocation fulfilling the first-order optimality conditions of the resource allocation problem, by solving a sequence of easier fractional problems. The second one enjoys a weaker optimality claim, but an even lower computational complexity. Numerical results demonstrate the merits of the proposed algorithms both in terms of energy-efficient performance and complexity, also showing that the two proposed algorithms for the overlay scenario perform very similarly, despite the different complexity.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin