Cognitive Interference Management in Retransmission-Based Wireless Networks

Cognitive radio methodologies have the potential to dramatically increase the throughput of wireless systems. Herein, control strategies which enable the superposition in time and frequency of primary and secondary user transmissions are explored in contrast to more traditional sensing approaches which only allow the secondary user to transmit when the primary user is idle. In this work, the optimal transmission policy for the secondary user when the primary user adopts a retransmission based error control scheme is investigated. The policy aims to maximize the secondary users' throughput, with a constraint on the throughput loss and failure probability of the primary user. Due to the constraint, the optimal policy is randomized, and determines how often the secondary user transmits according to the retransmission state of the packet being served by the primary user. The resulting optimal strategy of the secondary user is proven to have a unique structure. In particular, the optimal throughput is achieved by the secondary user by concentrating its transmission, and thus its interference to the primary user, in the first transmissions of a primary user packet. The rather simple framework considered in this paper highlights two fundamental aspects of cognitive networks that have not been covered so far: (i) the networking mechanisms implemented by the primary users (error control by means of retransmissions in the considered model) react to secondary users' activity; (ii) if networking mechanisms are considered, then their state must be taken into account when optimizing secondary users' strategy, i.e., a strategy based on a binary active/idle perception of the primary users' state is suboptimal.Comment: accepted for publication on Transactions on Information Theor

Maximum Throughput of a Secondary User Cooperating with an Energy-Aware Primary User

This paper proposes a cooperation protocol between a secondary user (SU) and a primary user (PU) which dedicates a free frequency subband for the SU if cooperation results in energy saving. Time is slotted and users are equipped with buffers. Under the proposed protocol, the PU releases portion of its bandwidth for secondary transmission. Moreover, it assigns a portion of the time slot duration for the SU to relay primary packets and achieve a higher successful packet reception probability at the primary receiver. We assume that the PU has three states: idle, forward, and retransmission states. At each of these states, the SU accesses the channel with adaptive transmission parameters. The PU cooperates with the SU if and only if the achievable average number of transmitted primary packets per joule is higher than the number of transmitted packets per joule when it operates alone. The numerical results show the beneficial gains of the proposed cooperative cognitive protocol.Comment: Accepted WiOpt 201

Cognitive Access Policies under a Primary ARQ process via Forward-Backward Interference Cancellation

This paper introduces a novel technique for access by a cognitive Secondary User (SU) using best-effort transmission to a spectrum with an incumbent Primary User (PU), which uses Type-I Hybrid ARQ. The technique leverages the primary ARQ protocol to perform Interference Cancellation (IC) at the SU receiver (SUrx). Two IC mechanisms that work in concert are introduced: Forward IC, where SUrx, after decoding the PU message, cancels its interference in the (possible) following PU retransmissions of the same message, to improve the SU throughput; Backward IC, where SUrx performs IC on previous SU transmissions, whose decoding failed due to severe PU interference. Secondary access policies are designed that determine the secondary access probability in each state of the network so as to maximize the average long-term SU throughput by opportunistically leveraging IC, while causing bounded average long-term PU throughput degradation and SU power expenditure. It is proved that the optimal policy prescribes that the SU prioritizes its access in the states where SUrx knows the PU message, thus enabling IC. An algorithm is provided to optimally allocate additional secondary access opportunities in the states where the PU message is unknown. Numerical results are shown to assess the throughput gain provided by the proposed techniques.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, 2 table

Energy-Efficient Cooperative Cognitive Relaying Schemes for Cognitive Radio Networks

We investigate a cognitive radio network in which a primary user (PU) may cooperate with a cognitive radio user (i.e., a secondary user (SU)) for transmissions of its data packets. The PU is assumed to be a buffered node operating in a time-slotted fashion where the time is partitioned into equal-length slots. We develop two schemes which involve cooperation between primary and secondary users. To satisfy certain quality of service (QoS) requirements, users share time slot duration and channel frequency bandwidth. Moreover, the SU may leverage the primary feedback message to further increase both its data rate and satisfy the PU QoS requirements. The proposed cooperative schemes are designed such that the SU data rate is maximized under the constraint that the PU average queueing delay is maintained less than the average queueing delay in case of non-cooperative PU. In addition, the proposed schemes guarantee the stability of the PU queue and maintain the average energy emitted by the SU below a certain value. The proposed schemes also provide more robust and potentially continuous service for SUs compared to the conventional practice in cognitive networks where SUs transmit in the spectrum holes and silence sessions of the PUs. We include primary source burstiness, sensing errors, and feedback decoding errors to the analysis of our proposed cooperative schemes. The optimization problems are solved offline and require a simple 2-dimensional grid-based search over the optimization variables. Numerical results show the beneficial gains of the cooperative schemes in terms of SU data rate and PU throughput, average PU queueing delay, and average PU energy savings

Optimal Random Access and Random Spectrum Sensing for an Energy Harvesting Cognitive Radio with and without Primary Feedback Leveraging

We consider a secondary user (SU) with energy harvesting capability. We design access schemes for the SU which incorporate random spectrum sensing and random access, and which make use of the primary automatic repeat request (ARQ) feedback. We study two problem-formulations. In the first problem-formulation, we characterize the stability region of the proposed schemes. The sensing and access probabilities are obtained such that the secondary throughput is maximized under the constraints that both the primary and secondary queues are stable. Whereas in the second problem-formulation, the sensing and access probabilities are obtained such that the secondary throughput is maximized under the stability of the primary queue and that the primary queueing delay is kept lower than a specified value needed to guarantee a certain quality of service (QoS) for the primary user (PU). We consider spectrum sensing errors and assume multipacket reception (MPR) capabilities. Numerical results show the enhanced performance of our proposed systems.Comment: ACCEPTED in EAI Endorsed Transactions on Cognitive Communications. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1208.565

Power-Optimal Feedback-Based Random Spectrum Access for an Energy Harvesting Cognitive User

In this paper, we study and analyze cognitive radio networks in which secondary users (SUs) are equipped with Energy Harvesting (EH) capability. We design a random spectrum sensing and access protocol for the SU that exploits the primary link's feedback and requires less average sensing time. Unlike previous works proposed earlier in literature, we do not assume perfect feedback. Instead, we take into account the more practical possibilities of overhearing unreliable feedback signals and accommodate spectrum sensing errors. Moreover, we assume an interference-based channel model where the receivers are equipped with multi-packet reception (MPR) capability. Furthermore, we perform power allocation at the SU with the objective of maximizing the secondary throughput under constraints that maintain certain quality-of-service (QoS) measures for the primary user (PU)

Access Policy Design for Cognitive Secondary Users under a Primary Type-I HARQ Process

In this paper, an underlay cognitive radio network that consists of an arbitrary number of secondary users (SU) is considered, in which the primary user (PU) employs Type-I Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ). Exploiting the redundancy in PU retransmissions, each SU receiver applies forward interference cancelation to remove a successfully decoded PU message in the subsequent PU retransmissions. The knowledge of the PU message state at the SU receivers and the ACK/NACK message from the PU receiver are sent back to the transmitters. With this approach and using a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) model and Constrained Multi-agent MDP (CMMDP), centralized and decentralized optimum access policies for SUs are proposed to maximize their average sum throughput under a PU throughput constraint. In the decentralized case, the channel access decision of each SU is unknown to the other SU. Numerical results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed policies in terms of sum throughput of SUs. The results also reveal that the centralized access policy design outperforms the decentralized design especially when the PU can tolerate a low average long term throughput. Finally, the difficulties in decentralized access policy design with partial state information are discussed