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

Joint Secure Beamforming for Cognitive Radio Networks with Untrusted Secondary Users

In this paper, we consider simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems with the coexistence of information receivers (IRs) and energy receivers (ERs). The IRs are served with best-effort secrecy data and the ERs harvest energy with minimum required harvested power. To enhance physical-layer security and yet satisfy energy harvesting requirements, we introduce a new frequency-domain artificial noise based approach. We study the optimal resource allocation for the weighted sum secrecy rate maximization via transmit power and subcarrier allocation. The considered problem is non-convex, while we propose an efficient algorithm for solving it based on Lagrange duality method. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm as compared against other heuristic schemes.Comment: To appear in Globecom 201