Optimal Bits per Joule Power Allocation for

Multiuser Cognitive Radio Networks

M. Naeem, K. Illanko, A. Karmokar, A. Anpalagan and M. Jaseemuddin
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ryerson University, Canada
AbstractDesigning future wireless systems to be energy-
efcient to cut carbon emissions is important. In this paper,
the problem of determining the power allocation that maximizes
the energy-efciency of cognitive radio systems is formed as a
constrained optimization problem, where the objective function
is the ratio of the total capacity and the total power. The
optimization problem belong to a class of problems known as
concave fractional programs (CFP). Charnes-Cooper Transfor-
mation (CCT) is used to transform the CFPs into equivalent
concave optimization (CP) problem. The power allocation for the
transformed CP problem becomes a type of water-lling, in terms
of the Lagrange multipliers. However, the explicit determination
of these Lagrange multipliers is intractable. Therefore, we trans-
form the problem into parametric form and propose an iterative
algorithm that produces -optimal solution. The convergence of
the algorithm is proved and numerical solutions obtained using
simulations are presented.
Index TermsPower allocation, energy-efciency, green cog-
nitive radio.
I. INTRODUCTION
The information and communication technology (ICT) sec-
tor to the global CO
2
emissions is responsible approximately
the same as that of the aviation industry [1]. According to a
recent study, it has been estimated that ICT is responsible for
about 5% of the total energy consumption. The recent expo-
nential growth in the use of wireless communications in public,
professional, and private life coupled with the critical need
to reduce CO
2
emissions have induced a new research area
called green communications with overall energy-efciency
of communication systems as the objective [2]. Cognitive
radio has been proposed as an effective approach for higher
spectral and energy efciency in wireless communication
systems for two reasons. Firstly, the energy efciency related
functionalities can be embedded into the cognitive operational
cycle. Secondly, from the green perspective, spectrum is a
natural resource which should not be wasted on idle licensed
channels but be shared efciently [3].
An overview on energy saving studies conducted in 3GPP
LTE standard body can be found in [4]. Accordingly, most
of the current research focus on base station energy saving
with efforts to reduce energy consumed by the transmitters
(such as, power ampliers, etc). They emphasize the need for
a holistic network level solution based on novel architectures
and methods, such as, relay, user cooperation and cognitive
approaches. We also take a similar approach at the physical
layer in our work using energy-efciency as the objective. The
tradeoff between energy efciency (EE) and spectral efciency
(SE) in the downlink of OFDMA networks is investigated
in [5]. After showing that EE is quasi-concave in SE, the
authors use an approximation on this relation to obtain an
algorithm that is used for power and subcarrier allocation.
Energy efciency in the uplink of a OFDMA system is
addressed in [6].
In this paper, we investigate the optimal and -optimal
power allocation schemes to maximize the bits/Joule energy
efciency of multiuser cognitive radio networks. The proposed
schemes are also validated through simulation results. We
propose and formulate novel constrained non-convex optimiza-
tion problem and derive their optimal solutions that maximize
the energy efciency for multiuser cognitive radio networks.
We rst show that the proposed constrained optimization
problems belong to a class of fractional programming prob-
lems that are known as concave fractional programs (CFPs).
We use Charnes-Cooper transformation (CCT) to transform
the CFPs into concave optimization problems for which the
power allocation becomes a type of water-lling with energy
efciency as the primary objective. We also present iterative
-optimal solutions for the CFPs. A detailed analysis of the
performance of -optimal algorithms is presented with the
simulation results.
II. SYSTEM MODEL AND PROBLEM FORMULATION
We use A, a, and a to represent matrix, vector and an
element of a vector respectively. When a
i
0 for all
components i of a vector a, we use a 0. We use the
following expression (a)
+
max(0, a) to ensure positivity
of a real number. We use log
2
as log and log
e
as ln.
Consider a wireless network in downlink with one transmit-
ter, K secondary users (SUs), and M licensed primary users
(PUs). M PUs can mean to be either M PU devices or M
geographic locations or regions in which the strength of the
cognitive radio signals must be constrained. Transmissions to
each SU take place on a separate, preassigned subchannel, and
a central controller decides the power level. We denote by p
c
,
the static circuit power of the source in the transmit mode [5],
p
k
, source transmit power to serve kth SU, I
m
, the interference
threshold at the mth PU and h
k
, the channel from the source
to kth SU.
In our system model, as shown in Fig. 1, there is a PU
protection area wherein the strengths of the cognitive radio
Fig. 1. A cognitive radio system model.
signals must be constrained. We dene as: R, the radius of
the protected circular area for each individual PU. Given a
distance d
m
between the SU base station and the mth PU and
the radius R
m
of the protected circular area of the mth PU, the
channel from the source to mth PU in kth SU band is given
as g
m,k
=
g
m,k
(dmRm)

, where g
m,k
is the small scale fading
and is the path loss exponent. For simplicity, throughout this
paper and in simulation results we assume that R
1
= R
2
=
= R
M
.
The IEEE 802.22 WRAN standard recommends two
schemes for PU protection. These are listen-before-talk (spec-
trum sensing) and geo-location/database schemes [7]. In the
listen-before-talk scheme, the SU senses the presence of
primary network signals in order to select the channels that are
not in use. In geo-location/database scheme, the locations of
primary and secondary users are stored in a central database.
The central controller/spectrum manager (also called as base
station) of the SUs has the access to the location database. In
this paper, we assume that secondary networks base station
(BS) gets the location information of each PU from the central
database. We also assume that BS can estimate the active PUs
channel gains, perhaps via pilot power detection on a regular
basis. Our goal is to maximize the energy efciency of the
secondary users transmissions while meeting the interference
constraints due to the primary users. The energy efciency
(EE) metric we use in this paper is information bits per Joule
[8]. For our system model, we can express EE as
(p) =

K
k=1
C
k
p
c
+

K
k=1
p
k
(1)
where C
k
= log
_
1 +
p
k
h
k
N0
_
is the maximum theoretical
spectral efciency (SE) (bits/s/Hz) due to Shannon on the link
to kth SU. Mathematically, we can write the EE maximization
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
0
500
1000
Transmit power (watts)
E
E
(
b
i
t
s
/
j
o
u
l
e
/
H
z
)


10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
0
5
10
S
E

(
b
i
t
s
/
s
/
H
z
)
EE
SE
h = 0.5
h = 1
Fig. 2. Plots for EE and SE as a function of transmit power.
problem for cognitive radio as:
max
p
(p)
subject to
C1 :
K

k=1
p
k
g
m,k
I
m
, m
C2 : p
k
0, k
(2)
In (2), the constraint C1 assures that interference to primary
users is less than a specied threshold. The EE maximization
problem in (2) is not a convex optimization problem. Fig. 2
shows two scenarios of the typical variation of EE and SE with
transmit power for the single user case. In the rst scenario,
channel gain between the SU and BS is set to 0.5 and in the
second scenario, channel gain between the SU and BS is set to
1. From Fig. 2, we can observe that EE achieves a maximum
while SE continues to increase with transmit power. We can
say that optimum SE solution does not mean optimum EE
solution.
In the next section, we will provide optimal power allocation
by transforming the non-convex EE maximization problem
into a concave maximization problem.
III. OPTIMAL POWER ALLOCATION
In this section, we rst introduce concave fractional program
(CFP) and then show that optimization problems (2) is a CFP.
Denition 1. Fractional programming : An optimization prob-
lem is a fractional program (FP) if the objective function is
the ratio of two functions. A FP problem can be expressed as:
max
xX
f(x)
g(x)
subject to
h
i
(x) 0, i = 1, 2, , N
(3)
where f , g, h
i
(i = 1, 2, , N) denote real-valued functions
which are dened on the set X of R
n
[9].
Denition 2. Concave fractional programming : The FP in
(3) is a concave fractional program (CFP) if it satises the
following two conditions:
1) f is concave and g is convex on X
2) f is positive on S if g is not afne
where S = {x X : h
i
(x) 0, i = 1, 2, , N} [9].
In a CFP, any local maximum is a global maximum and, in
a differentiable CFP, a solution of the Karush Kuhn Tucker
(KKT) conditions provide the maximum [10]. We note that in
(2), the function in the numerator is a concave function and
denominator is afne and all the constraints are afne.
We can also observe that the optimization problem (2) is
differentiable and satisfy the conditions of CFP. It means that
in optimization problems (2) any local maximum is a global
maximum and the KKT conditions give the optimal solution.
A CFP with afne denominator can be reduced to a concave
program with Charnes-Cooper Transformation (CCT) [10],
[11]
1
. The Lemma 1 presents a CCT of (3) and also shows that
the transformed problem is a concave optimization problem.
Lemma 1. A CFP with afne denominator can be reduced to
the following concave program
max
y
t
X,t>0
tf
_
y
t
_
subject to
th
i
_
y
t
_
0, i = 1, 2, , N
tg
_
y
t
_
= 1
(4)
where y = tx and t =
1
g(x)
.
Proof : The proof is given in the Appendix A.
Now we focus on our optimization problem (2). With Charnes-
Cooper Transformation (CCT), we can write equivalent con-
cave program for (2) as:
max
y,t>0
t
K

k=1
log
_
1 +
y
k
h
k
tN
0
_
subject to
C1 :
K

k=1
y
k
g
m,k
tI
m
0, m
C2 : tp
c
+
K

k=1
y
k
= 1
C3 : y
k
0, k
(5)
Theorem 1. The power prole for which the total energy
efciency is maximized for (5) is
p

k
=
_
y

k
t

_
=
_
1

k
_
+
, k (6)
1
Exercise problem 4.7 in [?]
where
k
= ln2
_
+

M
m=1

m
g
m,k
_
,
m
and are La-
grange multipliers that are yet to be determined, and
k
=
h
k
N0
,
y

k
= t

_
1

k
_
+
, and t

=
1
pc+

K
k=1

+
.
Proof : The proof is given in the Appendix B.
We can see that the solution of the above problem is similar
to the water-lling algorithm. However, (6) needs to determine
(M+1) Lagrangian multipliers that is much more complex
as compared to simple water-lling algorithm. We call this
water lling as energy efcient water-lling in cognitive radio
networks. Since (5) is a concave optimization problem, we can
determine the Lagrangian multipliers with dual optimization.
We can write the Lagrangian dual objective function as:

d
(, ) = max L(y

, t

, , , ) (7)
and the dual optimization problem is
min
0,

d
(, )
(8)
The dual function needs to be minimized over and to
obtain the optimal dual solutions

and

. The problem
(8) can be solved with any gradient algorithm [10]. In the
next section, we present -optimal algorithms for the above
optimization problem.
IV. ITERATIVE ALGORITHM
In this section, we present iterative algorithms to solve the
optimization problem (2). We show that the proposed algo-
rithm is -optimal algorithms
2
. The algorithms are based on
Dinkelbach method for fractional programming problems [12].
In this approach, the fractional objective is transformed into
a parametric optimization problem. Consider the following
optimization problem, where x R
n
and q R.
max
x

n
(x)

d
(x)
subject to
x S
(9)
The parametric problem associated with (9) can be written as
max
x

n
(x)
d
(x)
subject to
x S
(10)
The following theorem shows the relation between (9) and
(10).
Theorem 2.

=
n
(x

)/
d
(x

) = max{
n
(x)/
d
(x)|x
S} if and only if, max{
n
(x)

d
(x)|x S} =

n
(x

d
(x

) = 0.
Proof : The proof is given in the Appendix C.
2
For any > 0, -optimal algorithms guarantee the solution within of
optimal.
We convert our optimization problem given in (2) to one
resembling (10) and then propose iterative -optimal algorithm
to get power allocations The Algorithm 1 present the pseudo
code of the proposed iterative scheme. In Appendix D, we
prove the convergence of the algorithms.
Now, we describe iterative algorithm. At the start of
the algorithm, it initializes , and iteration counter i
where is the ratio between total throughput and total
power. We can dene the fractional objective function (2)
as: (p, )

K
k=1
C
k

_
p
c
+

K
k=1
p
k
_
. The algo-
rithm iteratively solves the convex optimization problem:
arg max
p
{(p, ) | C1 and C2 of (2)}. With successive iter-
ations of the algorithm, the value of decreases. For ev-
ery , the power vector p that maximizes

K
k=1
C
k

_
p
c
+

K
k=1
p
k
_
is found. The algorithm terminates when
is zero or less than the given value. According to the
Theorem 2, at this terminal point of the algorithm, the p value
is either optimal or -optimal. If the value of is zero, then
p is the optimal power allocation; otherwise, p is -optimal
power allocation.
Algorithm 1 : Iterative -optimal algorithm.
1: Initialization:
2: 0
3: 10
6
4: i 0
5: Convergence false
6: Dene:
7: (p, )

K
k=1
C
k

_
p
c
+

K
k=1
p
k
_
8: ALgorithm Execution:
9: while (Convergence = false) and (i MaxIter) do
10: p arg max
p
{(p, ) | C1 and C2 of (2)}
11: if (p, ) = 0 then
12: p
o
p
13: Convergence = true
14: else if (p, ) then
15: p

p
16: Convergence = true
17: else
18:

K
k=1
C
k
pc+

K
k=1
p
k
19: i i + 1
20: end if
21: end while
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, we present simulation results to demonstrate
the performance and convergence of the proposed iterative
schemes. The impact of network parameters (e.g., number
of SUs, number of PUs, interference threshold) is also in-
vestigated. Convex fractional programming is used to get the
optimal energy efcient power allocation. Iterative algorithm
is implemented for -optimal solution.
2 4 6 8 10 12 14
10
4
10
5
10
6
Number of Iterations
E
E
(
b
i
t
s
/
J
o
u
l
e
/
H
z
)
Optimal, K = 5,M = 1,I
m
= 100W
Iterative, K = 5,,M = 1,I
m
= 100W
Optimal, K = 35,,M = 1,I
m
= 100W
Iterative, K = 35,M = 1,I
m
= 100W
Optimal, K = 75,M = 1,I
m
= 100W
Iterative, K = 75,M = 1,I
m
= 100W
Fig. 3. Performance of optimal and iterative power allocation algorithms.
2 4 6 8 10 12 14
10
2
10
3
10
4
10
5
10
6
Number of Iterations
E
E
(
b
i
t
s
/
J
o
u
l
e
/
H
z
)
Optimal, K = 5,M = 1,I
m
= 100mW
Iterative, K = 5,,M = 1,I
m
= 100mW
Optimal, K = 5,,M = 41,I
m
= 100mW
Iterative, K = 5,M = 41,I
m
= 100mW
Fig. 4. Performance of optimal and iterative power allocation algorithms.
In all simulations, the channel gain h is modeled as h =
K
o
_
do
d
_

[13]. where K
o
is a constant that depends on the
antenna characteristic and average channel attenuation, d
o
is
the reference distance for the antenna far eld, d is the distance
between transmitter and receiver, is the path loss constant
and is the Rayleigh random variable. Since this formula is
not valid in the near eld, in all the simulation results, we
assume that d is greater than d
o
. In all the results, d
o
= 20m,
K
o
= 50, = 3 and N
o
= 1W/Hz. The PUs protected
distance R
m
is set to 10m. The total circuit power P
c
is set
to 10
6
W.
Figs. 3 and 4 present the energy efciency plots with
the number of iterations for different number of SUs, PUs
and interference thresholds. The parameters for Figs. 3,
and 4 are (K, M, I
m
, ) = ({5, 35, 75}, 1, 100W, 10
6
) and
(5, {1, 41}, 100mW, 10
6
) respectively. From the simulation
results, we can see that the iterative algorithm converges to the
optimal solution within 10 iterations for all different scenarios
(different SUs, PUs etc). We can also observe that the energy
efciency increases with the number of secondary users. This
is due to the fact that with more secondary users, there is
more freedom in power allocation. We also observe that the
energy efciency decreases with the increase in the number
of primary users, because the optimization problem has more
number of constraints to satisfy.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we considered the optimization problem
of nding the power allocation that maximizes the energy-
efciency in bits per Joule per Hz of a cognitive radio network.
We showed that this problem belongs to a special class
of problems called concave fractional programming. Using
Charnes-Cooper transformation, we showed that the problem
can be transformed into to a concave optimization problem that
can be solved numerically using standard convex optimization
algorithms/toolsdepends on the Lagrange multipliers. For non-
cooperative communication, we derived a water-lling-like
solution. We also presented -optimal solutions using iterative
methods, where the CFP is transformed into parametric form.
The performance of -optimal iterative method was compared
with the optimal solution for different system parameters, such
as, the number of primary users, the number of secondary users
and the interference threshold.
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APPENDIX A
PROOF OF LEMMA 1
From (3), we can dene S = {x X : h
i
(x) 0, i}.
The transformation y = tx and t =
1
g(x)
is a one-to-one
mapping of S onto the feasible region of (4). Also
f(x)
g(x)
=
tf
_
y
t
_
for corresponding points x and (y, t). Hence (3) has
an optimal solution, if and only if (4) has optimal solution.
The two solutions are related to each other with the relation
y = tx and t =
1
g(x)
. Using the denition of convex
set and convex functions, we can show that the set X

=
{(y, t) R
n+1
:
y
t
, t > 0} is convex and th
i
_
y
t
_
is convex
on X

. Similarly, concavity of f on X implies concavity of

tf
_
y
t
_
on X

. Hence, (4) is a concave program.

APPENDIX B
PROOF OF THEOREM 1
We can write the objective function in (5) as
t
K

k=1
log
_
1 +
y
k
h
k
tN
0
_
=
_
K

k=1
log (t + y
k

k
)
_
Ktlogt
(11)
The Lagrangian function of (5) is given by
L(y, t, , , , ) =
_
t
K

k=1
log (t + y
k

k
)
_
Ktlogt

m=1

m
_
K

k=1
y
k
g
m,k
tI
m
_

_
tp
c
1 +
K

k=1
y
k
_
+
K

k=1

k
y
k
+ t,
(12)
where , , , are Lagrangian coefcients. Let y

k
and t

be
the optimal solutions. The KKT conditions can be written as
M

m=1

m
_
K

k=1
y

k
g
m,k
tI
m
_
= 0 (13)
_
tp
c
1 +
K

k=1
y

k
_
= 0 (14)

k
y

k
= 0k (15)
t = 0 (16)

k
0, k

m
0, m
0 (17)
1
ln2
t

k
t

+ y

k
+
k

M

m=1

m
g
m,k
= 0, k (18)
L
t

= 0 (19)
We can easily eliminate
k
and from the above KKT
conditions. The simplied KKT equations are
M

m=1

m
_
K

k=1
y

k
g
m,k
tI
m
_
= 0 (20)
_
tp
c
1 +
K

k=1
y

k
_
= 0 (21)

m
0, m (22)
1
ln2
t

k
t

+ y

m=1

m
g
m,k
= 0, k (23)
From (23) and constraints y

k
0, t

0, we get
_
y

k
t

_
=
_
_
1
ln2
_
+

M
m=1

m
g
m,k
_
1

k
_
_
+
, k. (24)
From the CCT, we have y

k
= p

k
t

. Hence, from (24), we get

the optimal power allocation as:
p

k
=
_
y

k
t

_
=
_
_
1
ln2
_
+

M
m=1

m
g
m,k
_
1

k
_
_
+
, k.
(25)
APPENDIX C
PROOF OF THEOREM 2
We adapt the proof in [12], but modify it to make it
relevant to our problem here. Given

=
n
(x

)/
d
(x

) =
max{
n
(x)/
d
(x)|x S} implies that
n
(x

d
(x

) = 0
and

{
n
(x)/
d
(x)|x S}. The last inequality implies

n
(x)

d
(x) 0 for x S, or, max{
n
(x)

d
(x)|x
S} = 0. The equality
n
(x

d
(x

) = 0 shows that
one of the locations where this maximum occurs is x

. This
proves the forward direction. The other direction is similar and
straight forward.
APPENDIX D
PROOF OF CONVERGENCE
We simplify what is in [12], but make it relevant to
our algorithms. Let
n
(p) = C
k
,
d
(p) = p
c
+

k
p
k
and F() = max{(p, )|C1, C2 of (2)} = max{
n
(p)

d
(p)|C1, C2 of (2)}. In order to prove Theorem 2, we need
the following two Lemmas.
Lemma 2. such that F() = 0.
Proof: Using the denition of continuity we can prove
that F() = 0 is continuous in . Furthermore lim
x
F() =
and lim
x
F() = +. By the intermediate value
theorem (IVT), such that F() = 0.
Lemma 3. F() is decreasing in .
Proof: Take
1
<
2
and let p

maximize
n
(p)
d
(p)
subject to C1, C2 of (2). Then F(
2
) = max{
n
(p)

d
(p} =
n
(p

)
2

d
(p

) <
n
(p

)
1

d
(p

)
max{
n
(p)
1

d
(p)} = F(
1
). We shall now prove the
theorem. Note that it is sufcient to show that (p, ) becomes
smaller than with the number of iterations. Since F() =
max{(p, )}, we only need to show that F() becomes
smaller than . We now show that is non-increasing in suc-
cessive iterations of the algorithm. If we use the subscript n to
denote the values of variables on the nth iteration, we have 0 =

n
(p
n1
)
n

d
(p
n1
) max{
n
(p
n1
)
n

d
(p
n1
)} =
F(
n
) =
n
(p
n
)
n

d
(p
n
) =
n+1

d
(p
n
)
n

d
(p
n
) =
(
n+1

n
)
d
(p
n
). Now, it follows that
n+1

n
, because

d
(p
n
) > 0. By Lemma 2, F() is decreasing in and we
just proved that is non-increasing in successive iterations of
the algorithm. Therefore, F() is non-increasing in successive
iterations of the algorithm. By Lemma 3, F() does become
zero which follows that F() does become smaller than .