Distributed Relay Selection and Power Control in Cognitive Radio Networks with Cooperative Transmission

In this paper, we present a distributed relay selection and power allocation scheme concurrently considering the channel states of all related links and residual energy state of the relay nodes for cooperative transmission in cognitive radio (CR) networks. Specifically, we formulate the CR network with cooperative transmission as a restless bandit system, which has been widely applied in operations research and stochastic control. The channel state and residual energy state are presented by finite state Markov chains. With this stochastic optimization formulation, the optimal policy for relay selection and power allocation is indexable, meaning that the relay with the highest index should be selected. The proposed scheme can achieve the tradeoff between achievable rate and network lifetime. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme.