Location-Information-Assisted Joint Spectrum Sensing and Power Allocation for Cognitive Radio Networks With Primary-User Outage Constraint

Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are expected to achieve 1000 times higher capacity compared with fourth-generation wireless networks. Thus, improving the spectrum efficiency (SE) is a crucial problem, which must be considered. Cognitive radio (CR) is considered an effective approach to alleviate the spectrum scarcity problem. In this paper, based on the location information of the primary transmitter (PT) and the CR network, we estimate the distance between the PT and the secondary transmitter (ST) and then propose a joint spectrum sensing and power allocation (JSS-PA) scheme to improve the SE of the CR network. In the JSS-PA scheme, we focus on jointly optimizing the sensing parameters and the transmit power of the secondary user (SU) such that the SE is maximized, whereas the primary user (PU) outage constraint is satisfied. When cooperative spectrum sensing is employed to detect the PU's status, we analyze two cooperative strategies, i.e., soft information fusion (SIF) and hard information fusion (HIF). Under the SIF strategy, the optimization of sensing and power (S-OSP) algorithm is proposed to maximize the SE. Under the HIF strategy, the optimization of thresholds (H-OT) algorithm is proposed, and then, the optimization of sensing and power (H-OSP) algorithm is proposed to find the optimal duration of local sensing, the optimal transmit power of the SU, and the optimal final decision threshold. Finally, we present the simulation results to evaluate the performance of the proposed JSS-PA scheme and discuss the effects of the optimal parameters on different schemes under SIF and HIF strategies.