RF-Powered Cognitive Radio Networks: Technical Challenges and Limitations

The increasing demand for spectral and energy efficient communication networks has spurred a great interest in energy harvesting (EH) cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Such a revolutionary technology represents a paradigm shift in the development of wireless networks, as it can simultaneously enable the efficient use of the available spectrum and the exploitation of radio frequency (RF) energy in order to reduce the reliance on traditional energy sources. This is mainly triggered by the recent advancements in microelectronics that puts forward RF energy harvesting as a plausible technique in the near future. On the other hand, it is suggested that the operation of a network relying on harvested energy needs to be redesigned to allow the network to reliably function in the long term. To this end, the aim of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the recent development and the challenges regarding the operation of CRNs powered by RF energy. In addition, the potential open issues that might be considered for the future research are also discussed in this paper.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, Accepted in IEEE Communications Magazin

On Orthogonal Band Allocation for Multi-User Multi-Band Cognitive Radio Networks: Stability Analysis

In this work, we study the problem of band allocation of $M_s$ buffered secondary users (SUs) to $M_p$ primary bands licensed to (owned by) $M_p$ buffered primary users (PUs). The bands are assigned to SUs in an orthogonal (one-to-one) fashion such that neither band sharing nor multi-band allocations are permitted. In order to study the stability region of the secondary network, the optimization problem used to obtain the stability region's envelope (closure) is established and is shown to be a linear program which can be solved efficiently and reliably. We compare our orthogonal allocation system with two typical low-complexity and intuitive band allocation systems. In one system, each cognitive user chooses a band randomly in each time slot with some assignment probability designed such that the system maintained stable, while in the other system fixed (deterministic) band assignment is adopted throughout the lifetime of the network. We derive the stability regions of these two systems. We prove mathematically, as well as through numerical results, the advantages of our proposed orthogonal system over the other two systems.Comment: Conditional Acceptance in IEEE Transactions on Communication