Energy and throughput efficient cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio sensor networks

The sensing-throughput trade-off and the sensing-energy trade-off for cooperative spectrum sensing have been the subject of recent research. Two important, but often conflicting, design objectives for low-power devices are throughput and energy efficiency. These have not been comprehensively investigated jointly in cognitive radio networks for the design of spectrum sensing algorithms. This paper examines the energy-throughput trade-off for cooperative spectrum sensing and formulates an optimisation problem for the trade-off between energy and throughput for secondary users based on spectrum sensing efficiency. The objective is to minimise the energy consumed in spectrum sensing, reporting cooperative decisions to a central entity and data transmission while satisfying reliability constraints and providing a given throughput to secondary users. A heuristic solution is developed that determines the optimal sensing, reporting and transmission duration. Analysis and simulation results reveal the optimal value for sensing, reporting and transmission duration in order to achieve the best trade-off between energy consumption and throughput for secondary users. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.